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pedagogy
/peddgogi, -goji/
Do you know what this word means?  If you care about teaching or learning, you should.  It concerns the way I and others attempt to impart something to you in your time at the College.
I do my best to help each student succeed, but I can’t help anyone who doesn’t try to help themselves.  Don’t come to me looking for a handout.  If you’re having trouble, show some initiative.  If you bring me evidence that you have tried to solve a problem but were unsuccessful, I’ll give you a lot of time.  If you arrive empty handed I will send you away to do the basics before investing my time.  Learning is a two way street.
Spoon feeding is a waste of your time.  Learning doesn’t happen when I talk at you.  It happens when we investigate problems together.  This means that I spend much of my time trying to get you to talk and very little of my time reading my notes or a book.  If I am really on a winning streak, I hardly talk at all during a discussion.  I pose a few questions and make a comment or two, but it’s you who do most of the talking.  It doesn’t always turn out this way, but that’s what I aim for.
Helping you develop the tools to think for yourself is the principal goal of every course I teach.  Critical thinking is far and away more important than anything you could learn about any of the subjects I teach.  Did I just say that?  Yes, I did.  When you take a course with me, I will try to teach you how to look at the world skeptically.  The willingness not to take the world at face value makes you a dangerous person, but only if you can use what you know.  Anyone can memorize facts and regurgitate them on an exam or in a homework assignment.  I am more concerned with what you think about what you see and how you can use it to change the world.
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