Introductions

By Jerry Green

Hi everyone. I wanted to do quick post to make introductions before jumping into anything substantive. As Marcus mentioned, I’m ABD at UT Austin, in the Joint Program in Ancient Philosophy. I also have an MA in Classics from UT, and that’s given me an interesting view of philosophy as a practice and as a discipline. So I hope to write occasionally about interdisciplinary work, about how philosophy looks from the vantage of another field, and about citations (I warn you now: I have a bee in my bonnet about citation practices in philosophy!)

I did an MA in Philosophy at Texas Tech before coming to UT, so I hope to say something about the MA-PhD pathway as well. I’m a big proponent of the terminal MA: its increasingly necessary to level the playing field in PhD applications. If you haven’t yet, you should read the recent ‘What’s it like to be a ____’ entry on doing a terminal MA. I know the application season is in full swing, so good luck out there.

Finally, I think a lot about teaching, and that’s what I hope to write about the most here. I’ve taught courses at UT and Texas Tech, and I adjunct at St Edwards University in Austin, where I work with non-traditional students like military vets and moms who had to skip college. In particular, I give a lot of thought to course design questions, like how much reading to assign and what kinds of assignments to use. My plan is to (i) share the strategies I’ve tried, and more importantly (ii) talk about the principles that motivate them. And most importantly of all, (iii) I want to see how other folks do things, so we can all learn from each other. I’ll also do an occasional review of works of pedagogy I like, collect links on various topics, things like that.

So that’s what you’re in for from me here at the Cocoon. I’m very excited to start, and I look forward to chatting with you all in the comments.

One last thing: If you have any suggestions for posts, especially on teaching, let me know! I want to write about things that people will find useful, and the less I have to guess about that, the better.

Comments

[Helen De Cruz]

Hi Jerry - this sounds very promising. I'd love to hear your thoughts on assigning reading (in your experience, how many words is not too much, and especially how do you motivate them to actually read the stuff!)

[Jerry Green]

That's one of the first things I wanted to write about! So stay tuned...

[Stacey Goguen]

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on teaching and citation practices. A specific topic I'd be interested in hearing about is how you go about setting goals for the course as a whole (learning outcomes), and whether you use them to reverse engineer assignments. And if so, how do you go about doing that.