Two articles caught my eye this morning: TeachPaperless’ decision to not plan out classes until he meets his students and Freakenomics’ recent discussion of matching students to schools at Maastricht University.

Both articles discuss optimizing the match between class material and student.  The Freakenomics post is a bare-bones mention of the problem and a request for help.  It does link to a study by one Alvin Roth: see if you note any familiar names in the ‘cited by’ list.

A.Faire Alchemist, at Teach Paperless, describes a similar problem and his solution.  He is preparing a student-guided class, investigating issues in modern history and human geography.  Students will explain what they want to learn in class, but also on twitter and in a wiki.

As he is, as described, in a paperless classroom, he does not have to worry about his students spending money on books they may not use, which is a big plus in a student-guided class with several likely but ultimately unpredictable outcomes.

I have two problems with his plan, possibly three.  Let’s get rid of the third problem right now as I hope it is trivial.  In the early days of assembly lines, efficiency managers operated on the belief that workers were inherently lazy and uninterested in their work.  They had to be prodded by sticks and encouraged by carrots as they would not work otherwise.  In my dark days, I sometimes feel the same way about my students.  On good days, my students drive me to work harder.  I understand that my job is to increase the number of good days I have, the number of days where my students are asking for more knowledge and instruction.

Alright, now to the first of my two, more pressing, problems.  I do not feel I have the same freedom in preparing class material.  For one thing, my students are judged partially by their results in a university wide exam so my teaching must focus on specific material to some extent.  For another, there is a specific text for class and a university wide (suggested) curriculum that is given out at the beginning of the year.

Perhaps the problem described above is partially mitigated by the second one below.

It seems likely that many students will want the status quo.  In my class, they will want three or four verb tenses, basic conversation models and some understanding of idioms they may encounter.  Most ESL texts for basic students cover the same material after all.  There must be some reason for that.

So, I don’t have freedom to change the material much, but there is a good possibility that students will want only small changes in the original material anyway.  If this is the case, my lesson plans already have space for some student-suggested material anyway.

I couldn’t think of anything worthy of writing this evening, until a slightly funny/very random occurrence just directed me back to an old joke-blog I started a while back about the life of a sensual panda bear, which, needless to say, only lasted for 2 posts.  A panda bear can only be so sensual, I guess.  The following is a quote from a… dare I say, ditzy?… friend of mine and the inspiration of that short-lived blog.  It would crack me up every time I heard/read it back then, and it hasn’t ceased to even today.

“The only way buster the wiener dog could have mated with this dog is if she laid on the ground; but for dogs that’s a big no-no, that stuff’s done on their feet. At least in my experience anyway.”

So there you have it.  Thank you and goodnight!

And I hate it.

I live 20 km or 40 minutes from work by car and probably a little more than an hour by public transport.  One of the big problems for me is the nature of the public transport I would have to use: two or more crowded buses or a bus, a roundabout subway ride and possibly a third bus.

One problem is that my university high up on the side of a mountain.  I am from Gangwondo (well, seven years there; it feels like home) and Gangwondo is known for rugged mountains, but I haven’t seen a city like Busan before.  A coworker who’s lived in San Francisco says the steep roads are comparable.

Anyway, I remain interested in alternate modes of transportation but I’m having trouble committing to them right now.

My previous blog had several posts about traffic and transportation.  I saw two articles recently that I recommend and this post seems the right place.

In Slate, Vanderbilt, author of Traffic, a fascinating book that I have yet to review properly, describes efforts to make a better stop sign.  I think there may have been a contest but I set the idea aside until I saw today’s article about traffic and connected the two.  Maybe tomorrow I will have time to look at the contest or the results.

In Scientific American, there is an article about encouraging walking through careful urban planning.  I wrote in 2008 about weak planning in Korea discouraging pedestrian traffic.

I hope I soon get back into writing real posts and not mere placeholders.