AAPT Members American Association of Philosophy Teachers

A recent article in the APA On-line Teaching Philosophy Newsletter describes an experiment where students were asked to insert emoticons at strategic places in the text of Plato's Euthyphro. For those of you who have been living in a cave (or perhaps you were living out of the cave) emoticons are those annoying little faces made with punctuation marks   (  :-)   ). This sounds absurd, but the examples in the article are quite interesting, and, at any rate, the exercise really gets the students to read the text closely. The article is on-line so it will only take you a moment to see the examples.

As you prepare for this semester's students, you might want to think a little bit about your policy for office hours. As usual, TΦ101 has some pointers including the most important piece of equipment you should have in your office.  We learned this from story of the famous scientist who was hired at a university and asked to teach first year students (he had never taught before).  After the test, a student broke down in tears in the professor's office. The professor called the president of the college and said, "There is a student in my office crying. What should I do?"  The president replied, "Hand her a tissue."    

Anyone who looks for a good on-line Plato translation will most likely older versions that don't work too well for students, such as Jowett or, at best, the translations from the Hamilton-Cairns volume. Cathal Woods has helped solve this problem by creating modern, open source, translations of Euthyphro-Apology-Crito. He is now working on Republic, and translations of Books I and II are already available.  Meanwhile, he also has an online logic text.  Nice work Cathal!

We are always adding new movies to our list of philosophical films. Just now we previewed Cold Souls with Paul Giamatti playing himself, raising a number of questions about mind/body, technology, and nihilism.  If you are teaching Marx and Marxism, you might also enjoy the wildly popular YouTube clip The Story of Stuff. 

A lot has been going on here at TΦ101 so we’ll try to catch you up. First, everyone on the TΦ101 staff is excited about the fact that sometime on Sunday, August 1, 2010, we received our 100,000th distinct visitor. So, welcome to you #100,000, wherever you are. We also just came back from the August 2010 Conference of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers, so we’ll be regaling you with lots of ideas that we learned at the conference.

• We’ve just added some hilarious new video clips, including a link to Philosophers’s Football and also a clip that illustrates Michael Sandel’s famous “trolley problem.”
• In the theory and reflection page, we’ve added a brief discussion of a remarkable article by David W. Concepcion and Juli Thorson Eflin on “transformative” learning, which provides a way of thinking about how people incorporate or reject ideas that conflict with their previous understanding of themselves. We also provide some links to material from Carol Dweck’s research (including a great YouTube) clip, on the relationship between how students understand their intelligence and how they approach learning. This is particularly important in helping us think about how we praise students for good work.
• We are also linking to some helpful materials by Jim Pryor at NYU, providing tips for students on how to read a text and how to write philosophy papers.

We in the humanities frequently stress the fact that we teach students to write. But some of the practices that we encourage may actually harm the writing effectiveness of our students when they leave the academy.  TΦ101 has a diagnosis of what we might be doing wrong and suggests some ways to fix it.

Here at TΦ101 central, the staff is always looking for good books on teaching.  If you are looking for a great book, take a look at Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, by Linda Nilson.  And, of course, we have a lot of other interesting books in our resources section.

In today's complex world when students are confronted with a variety of competing pressures, how can we provide them with some accountability to make sure that they do their reading assignments?  Peter Fernald has devised the "Monte Carlo quiz" as a way to encourage students to read their assignments and apply some critical thinking to them. 

Apparently some of the data suggests that women students are less likely to participate in class discussions.  TΦ101 has some suggestions for why this might be so and what to do about it, based in part on the work of psychologist Carol Dweck.

TΦ101 has a lot of information about how to create a syllabus. A second question, however, is how to get your students to actually read your masterpieces.  TΦ101 is not a fan of going over the syllabus during the first day of class.  It is a written document so students should read it.  One strategy is to ask students to do a short written exercise on the syllabus, leading to a discussion of the syllabus on a later class date.  

TP101 only teaches freshmen students, almost all of whom are right out of high school. Lack of experience, however, has never stopped TP101 from giving advice, so we present some strategies for dealing with older and part-time students, who bring their own set of issues and opportunities.

PowerPoint has become nearly universal in a lot of colleges.  Although not everyone is a fan, if you are going to use PowerPoint, you might as well use it effectively.  We offer some tips and some resources for further study. We also give some information about a new (and free) presentation software called Prezi. It has a whole new approach and is very impressive.

First, apologies to our readers for our long silence (it has been a month since our last update), but TΦ101 has been busy with finals, grading, graduation, and all of that. However, now we are back in mid-season form, so stay tuned for more frequent posts.  This week, we have some great material on how to monitor lecture effectiveness. The easiest way to do this is to collect five student notebooks and study them. We have a link to a great source that gives symptoms of problems and suggested solutions.