Three Things Thursday: Teaching, Carbon, and Bakken Photos

There’s a lot going in right now for me, but it’s mostly good (if a bit hectic) and when I have so much going on, it’s nice to dump some of it into a blog post. Thing the First I have been chatting with my classes about attendance. This isn’t a new thing for me. My approach this semester has been to talk about how classes are communities and like in communities when a handful of people don’t show up, the entire community is diminished. My students are skeptical. In some ways, they have every right to be. The idea is cliche and its swimming upstream against so many keep “metrics” in higher education from individual grading to the haunting specter of “personal accountability.” More than that, this group of students still has the experiences of COVID knocking around in their collective minds. They remember the experience of isolated learning and wonder, I suspect, whether this is how it should be. On the other hand, students do sometimes get it. They understand that the world is better…