Author: Kathy

This morning on PoliticsNation [MSNBC], I heard a terrific interview between host Al Sharpton and guest Neil deGrasse Tyson, the renowned astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium director (and invitee to our Nobel Conference a couple of years ago, but alas, his schedule was too tight) about engaging the public’s imagination for science and his own path…

Every Nobel conference seems to offer sub-themes that are at least as interesting as the stated theme. This year it seems to me that the panelists are reminding us over and over that any human experience is uber complex. All of them. I am also hearing over and over about the need for judgment about…

Another year at the Nobel Conference and it again strikes me that this may be the coolest thing Gustavus does. And that’s saying something, because we do lots and lots of cool things. The very idea that Nobel winners, and those at that level of accomplishment, come to southern Minnesota to share their research is…

Every fall is a reminder of the summer slide— the backwards roll in the summer months in what students learned the prior school year. Only this time I have been thinking about the summer slide for professors: how we seem to forget what we learned about our courses and how their assignments helped students learn,…

In my role as a business ethicist engaged in getting as many  conversations going about ethics as possible, having a speaker like we had Monday night is the best possible scenario. Nathan Mueller began writing to me a couple of years ago while he was still incarcerated in federal prison in Duluth, wanting to come…

THIS is why we do this experiential learning thing. This is exactly why. I had major anxiety about running the Power Game in a group this large—I have certainly never done it before, and I didn’t know anyone who had. We even sent it out over the OBTS-L listserv for insights from the most innovative…

An unexpected pleasure of this term at University of Canterbury: seeing fellow Gusties! Rachel Mohr ’16 and I met for lunch today in the re-configured Undercroft of the library. The Shilling Club boasts a terrific NZD$10 lunch, a great bargain for good food! Rachel is here in New Zealand studying the unique geology available in…

One of the assumptions underlying my appointment as a Visiting Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury is the belief that students learn most effectively using experiential methods. Actually, as I consider this, that assumption was also a key component of my being hired as the Board of Trustees Distinguished chair in Ethics and Leadership.…

This week, Sarah and I spent time talking largely about the “making sure they learned it” issue, and how we would reasonably know when there are no graded assigments. It’s a much more complex subject in a large class; I journaled on this last week. Some of it is indeed an aspect of teaching philosophy.…