Teaching Thursday: Notebooks, Double Dipping, and Getting Old

I’m more than halfway through the first week of classes and that feels like as good a time as any for a three things, teaching, Thursday: Thing the First For my historical methods class, I bit the bullet and bought the entire class Moleskine style black bound notebooks (which can be purchased at bulk for around $2 a notebook). The tipping point was this: In my class of 10 or so, no student had a paper notebook on their desk. This is the first time that I recall no students having a paper notebook. Not a one. The classes at my institution still attract the occasional one-notebook guy and we have more than our share of planner-proud students (especially from the “helping sciences” of nursing, social work, counseling, and so on), but this semester in the historical methods class, I had none of them. My hope is that getting students a notebook reduces the friction to pen-and-paper note taking and encourages students to write stuff down. I’m also going to design an AI assignment around it.…