Category Archives: Education

Honor Among Thieves

I happened to stumble (literally) across a website offering students essays for sale. Having taught at or been a teaching assistant at several universities, I know how seriously they take plagiarism: many schools will expel students caught turning in a paper not their own. That’s why the this particular site, which claims to be among […]

Liberty, Ethology, Pathology?

The New York Times Magazine recently ran an article about Liberty University’s debate team (HT: Dappled Things). It has an impressively large budget of $500,000, and its five full-time judges are aggressive about recruiting and training, making Liberty the highest-ranked school overall in several national debate associations. The article alludes to a difference between Liberty’s […]

Christine Rosen’s Fundamentalist Education

After hearing an interesting NPR interview with Christine Rosen, author of My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood, I thought her book would describe why she left “fundamentalism.” Other books do that: Leaving the Fold is a collection of testimonies of former “fundamentalists” who end up everywhere from milquetoast Christianity to bizarre spiritualistic […]

I’m Being Retentive About Retention

The spokesman at my alma mater gives a figure that doesn’t match my experience: Pait acknowledges that students sometimes feel as though the school’s policies “cramp their style.” However, the university maintains an extremely strong retention rate; sometimes as high as 95 percent. I think my freshman class had about 1500-2000 members, and I remember […]

Birthday Probability

Joe Carter at the Evangelical Outpost refers to what he calls the “birthday paradox,” which really means that it’s surprisingly likely that two in a group of people will share the same birthday. I once worked with a professor who exploited this for his own amusement and the class’s education. He’d offer to make a […]

New Again

I love the first day of school. The air is just a little bit cooler, and all the students are excited about starting the school year–some of them about beginning college for the first time. I’m anticipating the classes I’m taking and the ones I’m teaching; I’m going to learn new things and maybe so […]