Connecting current events to the past

Assignment idea for a recent history course: each week or topic the students find a news article on a similar topic and compare what happened in the past to what is going on now. Submit a short, sourced document that answers a few basic questions:

1. What can today's agents learn from the past?
2. What is something today that yesterday's actors did not face?

Fix the rubric for writing

More weight should be given to the response to argument, and the levels should be made so it is easier to give a satisfactory grade.

Nighttime on the quad

I was up late one night grading and decided to take a look at the classlist to see if anyone else was awake. To my surprise, at two o'clock more than a dozen of my students had the green dots indicating they were logged on to our learning management system. It could be that they did not log out when they finished earlier in the evening, and even if active they could have been in another course offering.

In my sleepy haze I had a vision of another place and time, where we were all together in a small, residential college located in a rural area. In my vision I was up late grading (of course) and decided to take a walk through the college quad. I looked up at the dorms to see several lights on in windows, and I wondered if those students were studying, socializing, or had left the lights on when they fell asleep.

Midterm Multiple Choice Questions

So this semester I faced a challenged on the midterm exam. Since every student was asked the same 20 questions on the chapter quizzes, how was I to select the 8 per chapter for the midterm? I started by selecting questions at random, but then I saw that some of them were a bit obscure and had been missed by a majority of students when they were asked on the chapter quiz. Instead I decided to ask the 8 that the students did best on from the chapter quizzes. That should help them do better on the midterm. I also made sure not to include any questions that referred to maps in the textbook.