Thursday, April 1, 2010

“Philosophy of Teaching and Learning Statement: Example ... - Associated Content” plus 3 more

“Philosophy of Teaching and Learning Statement: Example ... - Associated Content” plus 3 more

Philosophy of Teaching and Learning Statement: Example ... - Associated Content

Posted: 01 Apr 2010 01:36 PM PDT

The following is the statement of my teaching philosophy that helped me acquire my position as an Assistant Professor. Use it as a guide to start thinking about your teaching philosophy. We will revisit this topic again, so start thinking now!

Introduction

I am currently an instructor of Alabama GED students who utilize the on-line GED program. It is my responsibility to teach these students in the areas of reading comprehension, language arts and essay writing, science, history, and math, as well as to make certain the students' computers are compatible with the on-line program. I have been a teaching assistant at two very large research universities, the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois. At each university I completed courses on teaching and learning. I was a professor at a small, historically black university in Oklahoma after I received my doctorate. I grew up in Wisconsin, part of that time on a dairy farm, and I was very involved in 4-H and tutoring while I was in high school.

My Philosophy Of Teaching And Learning

In regard to how I teach, I want students to discover facts, not just learn them by rote. Science is a wonderful field for such a teaching strategy. Although the students will need some background information, if I am successful at teaching them how to discover information, they will have a more effective way of absorbing the background data and looking at new information when it is presented.

I believe that students can be excited about learning and that learning across disciplines is often a key component to getting more students interested in the subject matter. I like to bring in examples of how the information that they are learning, like balancing a dairy feed ration for example, could have an impact on other fields, such as the data that the soil and water conservation students are collecting.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Review: “Police, Adjective” a philosophy lesson in ... - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Posted: 01 Apr 2010 02:26 PM PDT

Eccentric and esoteric, "Police, Adjective" is a philosophy lesson in disguise, a bone-dry comedy if it's a comedy at all. Cristi (Dragos Bucur) is a Romanian undercover cop assigned to bust a pot-smoking teenager. The officer's lot is not a happy one. The stakes are small and the hours drag (we see looooong real-time shots of the suspect's house from Cristi's stakeout across the street).

Most of his police co-workers perform their jobs with passive-aggressive apathy; Cristi is alone in wondering aloud if what they are doing is worthwhile. Busting the teenager will send him to prison and ruin his life, even though marijuana is likely to be decriminalized soon.

This is a film of ideas rather than action. Director Corneliu Porumboiu tells his tale with industrial-strength irony directed against a rigid official orthodoxy. When Cristi and his schoolteacher wife, Anca (Irina Saulescu), discuss the imagery in a sappy love ballad, he contends that it's superficial and she argues that it's symbolic. Ultimately, she says, what words mean depends on the rulings of the council that created the dictionary, the Romanian Academy.

In the same way, Cristi's intuitive crisis of conscience launches a theoretical discussion of duty and morality when his coolly rational boss conducts a tutorial on the meaning of "conscience," "law" and "police." The ideological interpretations that are thrust on Cristi box him into responses he doesn't really believe. What looks like reasoned debate is actually an object lesson in coercion.

To take the film at its drab face value would be a mistake; there is sharp satire at work here. Cristi's colleagues are a rogue's gallery of foot-draggers and boobs, willing to fritter away their time with discussions of how to make their frowzy city a glittering tourist destination. As Cristi's indoctrination on his responsibilities grinds on and on, it appears to be a comic scene. But the film's trick is making us take seriously what appears to be a parody.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

In his new novel, 'The Exorcist' author balances ... - Los Angeles Times

Posted: 01 Apr 2010 11:06 AM PDT

In the annals of demonology, William Peter Blatty falls somewhere between St. Augustine and Joss Whedon.

He isn't the first person who's ever written about demons and demonic possession, but he has provided us with one of the genre's most memorable novels, 1971's "The Exorcist." There had been disturbing stories before, but nothing -- especially when Blatty teamed up with director William Friedkin for the 1973 screen adaptation -- so terrified audiences about the possibilities of the diabolical in ordinary people's lives.

For Blatty, though, the story's success remains beyond his wildest expectations.

"I honestly thought I was writing just a one-shot," the 82-year-old author said in a recent phone interview from his Maryland home. "At the time, comedy writing was over for me, and nobody would hire me to write anything dramatic. What I had left to write was the idea for 'The Exorcist.' I never imagined what would happen."

What happened was a mega-bestseller: More than 13 million copies, according to some estimates, have been sold in the United States alone. Several more novels -- and films -- followed, giving Blatty more opportunities to explore the workings of divine redemption and demonic evil. His new novel, "Dimiter," published in March, is similarly preoccupied with good and evil, with the mysterious and the miraculous, although it is also something of a departure.

Set in the 1970s, "Dimiter" introduces us, in a riveting opening scene, to an enigmatic inmate in an Albanian prison during the gray days of Enver Hoxha's regime. The man coolly withstands unbearable torture and then escapes, vanishing like a phantom . . . only to later turn up in the Holy Land. He becomes a shadowy presence in the lives of several people, including an Arab Christian policeman and a Jewish doctor, both of whom puzzle over several mysterious deaths somehow linked to this figure, who is named Paul Dimiter.

If you look more closely, the story also makes a sly, theological nod to the essential mystery of the Gospels that Christians everywhere will celebrate on Sunday: the Resurrection. Blatty has taken a message of religious faith and enfolded it within a fast-paced plot for a basic reason.

"I had to make a page-turner," he says, "or else who would want to read it?"

The demonic is a hot commodity today, but don't try to credit Blatty as the elder statesman of this surge in horror movies, books and TV shows. He wants no part of it.

"When I look around the culture, it makes me want to projectile vomit," he says, recalling that infamous moment in "The Exorcist." "The more blood, the more chain saws, the better. The studios have so debased the tastes of kids that that's all the kids want now."

This might sound strange coming from the author of a story associated with harrowing uses of puke, spinning heads and a crucifix, but Blatty's brand of horror has always been about more than shock effect. Characters wrestle with metaphysical doubts even as the bodies pile up.

Some people forget the philosophy -- just as studio execs forgot Blatty's abilities as a comic writer after "The Exorcist."

"Their eyes glazed over when I pitched comedy ideas. It was as if I had done nothing else before 'The Exorcist,' " says the man who wrote the screenplay for "A Shot in the Dark" and other film comedies. "It was as if I had landed on this planet just with that book under my arm. It made me insane."

Blatty's voice is warm and generous -- it's easy to catch the inflection of the New York City streets where he was born, the son of Lebanese parents. He's passionate about his Roman Catholicism: It has carried him through many personal trials, including a bout of cancer 15 years ago and the loss, in 2006, of his 19-year-old son, Peter, after a sudden illness. "Dimiter," in fact, is dedicated to him.

Today, Blatty's faith is, to use a familiar religious adage, rock solid.

"I don't think I'm on a search anymore," he says serenely. "I've come to virtually a complete rest in my faith."

The author sounds very much like Moses Mayo, a truth-seeking neurologist in "Dimiter." Like Blatty, Mayo is humbled by the universe's mysteries. Where others find a conflict between science and faith, Mayo sees a glorious complementarity. He marvels at how "in the subatomic world . . . electrons, like saints with bleeding hands, are reportedly seen in two places at once." Mayo's early morning musings, as he walks the halls of Hadassah Hospital, form a quiet counterpoint to the tightening circles of intrigue as Dimiter's story slowly comes into focus.

The germ of "Dimiter" dates to the filming of "The Exorcist." Blatty recalls sitting in Friedkin's office reading in the New York Times about a Jesuit priest executed in Albania for baptizing infants in a prison camp.

From this, the near-mythological figure of Dimiter started to take shape. Other ideas came along -- the story of Saul's conversion into St. Paul, narrative inconsistencies among the four Gospels and the geography of Jerusalem. Blatty traveled there and conducted countless interviews with doctors and lepers, and with local police about crime lab procedures and ways to poison someone without leaving a trace.

When he was finished, Blatty had a giant stack of notes, typed, single-spaced. But no sense of organization.

"Writing had never been a problem for me," he says. "A comedy novel? I could get it done in six weeks. You need a screenplay? Sure, six weeks. Then 'Dimiter' came along and took years."

Other projects intervened in the years that followed. When he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, Blatty says, he prayed to the Virgin Mary, promising to finish the novel if he recovered. He did, but he stalled on his promise -- that pestering question of organization again. Then, two years ago, as he and his wife Julie were attending Mass, the book's structure came to him in a flash of insight.

"I felt like I had received a gift," he says, "or maybe it had been there in my unconscious all along. Who knows? It's all a mystery."

Mystery -- it's everywhere in "Dimiter," which Blatty hopes to bring to the big screen with Friedkin as director. But religion isn't the only medium in which mystery exists -- you find it in science and secret intelligence, as well as simpler things, such as the love between friends and family. All of these overlap in "Dimiter," although Blatty insists it isn't necessary to understand every level to appreciate the story.

"You can read it just as a thriller and that's great," he says. "If you have faith, though, it might strengthen it a little more. If you're agnostic, it might give you a few clues you never had before. The message is there if you need it."

nick.owchar@latimes.com

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Professors Enlighten Radio Audiences With Philosophy ... - Diverse: Issues in Higher Educatio

Posted: 01 Apr 2010 05:43 AM PDT

Does the mention of philosophy professors conjure up images of esoteric eggheads?

If so, you might think again.

Two California philosophy professors have mused and opined on the radio airwaves for six years. Their growing audience illustrates the receptiveness among the public to set aside time for quiet reflection.

Welcome to "Philosophy Talk," a nationally syndicated call-in public radio show that bills itself as a "program that questions everything, except your intelligence," and closes by thanking listeners — for thinking.

The weekly, one-hour broadcast is the brainchild of Dr. John Perry, a University of California, Riverside philosophy professor. His co-host is Dr. Ken Taylor, the Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. They recently taped their 200th episode.

The program began with seed money from Stanford in a tiny broadcast booth in San Francisco. Media observers doubted it would survive more than a few months, but its improbable theme became a magnet for audiences. The show was picked up in states such as Louisiana, New York and Oregon and now airs on several stations.

Hosts Perry and Taylor chat with notable guests and entertain calls from listeners on topics as wide-ranging as terrorism and suicide, to happiness and beauty to the seemingly arcane. The professors banter like a well-traveled comedy duo and often find themselves with more callers than time during the course of each episode. Their ponderings frequently result in cerebral questions such as, "If truth is so valuable, why is there so much B.S.?"

But the professors also offer ethical advice to callers struggling with conundrums of more practical consequence. For instance, should a worker continue taking a child to the company day care despite having quit his job?

In a recent San Francisco Chronicle interview, Taylor said, "Our culture is debased because there is not enough deep reflection. You can philosophize on just about anything."

Discussions from weekly shows often migrate to the "Philosophy Talk" blog or Facebook page. Past shows are downloadable at philosophytalk.org.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
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