As for your last post RE: student workload, I am curiuos what the issue is. In my five years at two different colleges, the only problem I had with workload (and this is coming from someone who had 10 problem sets per week one semester) was teachers, particularly in the humanities, assigning more reading than was humanly possible and expecting the students to determine which reading was necessary. This approach, I think, is reasonable if the reading is outlining concepts: it is worth teaching college students to turn to different sources to find, say, which explanation of the Brownian motion is most comprehensible. However, if the student is “responsible” for each sentence of an impossible amount of reading, this strikes me as, at best, unproductive–class discussions suffer when some have read one text and others another–and at times unfair. I would cite John McWilliams as a humanities professor who appreciates the wisdom of assigning a realistic amount of reading. The sciences, I found, did not suffer from this problem–instead there was the issue of not receiving more credits for classes with laboratory components. I hope this oversight will be addressed, out of fairness and to remove impediments to taking classes in the sciences.

Generally, though, learning how to manage a high workload is a very useful skill indeed.

Looking forward to reading more of your posts!

I think it’s great that you’ve made the leap to the blogosphere, but now the students have to meet you half-way.