I talk about an email that a professor posted in a sociology group chat that I belong to.  The student asked, "Will I miss anything important?"  I reflect on why this question seems so offensive to professors, what my own response would be, and analyze how other professors responded.  I then demonstrate how the content and tone of our correspondence to students can negatively affect underrepresented minorities.  

This poem is a continuation of the episode, The Need for Black Excellence.   Excellence is not big enough to explain and quantify black excellence. This discussion touches on how history needs to expand in order to include black history and how black graduations need to exist because it celebrates something noteworthy in a black person's experience within the education system.  

I commentate on a poem that I wrote about black excellence to give a deeper understanding of this concept and why it is so important.  Excellence is not big enough to explain and quantify black excellence. This discussion touches on how history needs to expand in order to include black history and how black graduations need to exist because it celebrates something noteworthy in a black person's experience within the education system.  

As I find myself frustrated about how my hybrid Camry is grading me, I use this experience to reflect on how we can apply an equity lens to the way we grade our students.  The three things that my Camry inspired me to think about are 1) being transparent about how we are grading, 2) being as objective as possible when we are grading, and 3) becoming aware of the hidden curriculum in how we are grading. 

Community building and connecting students to the services on campus it the focus of this episode.  I talk about a quick and effective ice breaker that I use and then I walk the students around campus.  I have found that taking them around campus increases the chance that they will actually visit the space in the future.

In this episode, I go over four key elements that you want to make sure you accomplish on your first day of school.  You need to let students know the "flow" of your class.  Tell the students things about you that help them understand that you are human.  Let the students know that you are passionate about what you do.  And lastly, make sure you let them know that you care about their success.

Although there may be a reason to give students a cumulative final, I argue, that these types of exams are an abomination to student learning.  In this episode, I explain how cumulative finals punish students that depend on their jobs (i.e. poor students) for no good reason at all.  This episode concludes my Fall19 season.  I will be back Thursday, January 23.  Enjoy your break!

Looking at group work projects through an equity lens helps us understand that students who are dependent on their jobs are at a huge disadvantage if we do not fully integrate this assignment into our teaching design.  What this means is that we must introduce group projects early in the semester, be purposeful while introducing group members to each other, create time for groups to work together during class and allow students to critique themselves and their group mates.

Do we assume that students know how to write a research paper?  Do we assume that students will be able to figure out how to write a research paper if we assign one?  This assumption negatively affects student equity groups, but there is something we can do about this.  If we are going to give an assignment, we MUST invest in teaching our students the skill set that is involved.  In this episode, I break down how to "scaffold" a research paper in a way that positively affects student success.

In this episode, I looked at how I used to grade classroom participation through an equity lens.  I noticed that I overvalued students that talked in class, which made it unnecessarily difficult for low socioeconomic students, students with different ways of processing information, and students that do not speak English as a first language to participate during class.  This process made me think about why I value classroom discussion/participation, helped me create a more equitable system of measuring classroom participation and facilitated a classroom design that works towards getting students to participate.