Hello Everyone,

I’m looking forward to seeing some of you on Friday in Liverpool – my colleague and I will be travelling up tomorrow and checking out the delights of Liverpool on a Thursday night.

I just spotted this article http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/31/after-student-complaints-utah-professor-denied-job in a LinkedIn update (so many of you will already have seen it, too) about a lecturer whose teaching methods didn’t find favour with his students.  Whether that was the whole reason for him not achieving tenure will presumably come out as the legal cases progresses.  But what, you may wonder, were his great crimes in challenging students with harsh methods? Group work and calling on individual students to answer in class, apparently!

Our Dean recently advocated the use of allocated seating plans for classes, to enable attendance monitoring and random selection of students to answer questions.  I probably won’t need to make a decision on whether I like that idea or not, since a cohort of 400 will surely rule it out anyway.

Best midweek wishes

Alexandra Hemingway

Professional Development and Employability Tutor

Faculty of Business, Economics and Law

University of Surrey, GU2 7XH

Tel: 01483 683080

Email: [log in to unmask]

Twitter: @AJHemingway

Blog: www.thecareerslady.wordpress.com