What’s all this, then?

Academe and Animals

The best part of teaching is seeing students’ eyes light up when the spark plugs of cognition are firing. The second best part of teaching is talking about teaching with other instructors.

This is a weekly newsletter primarily about teaching undergraduates. Tips and observations about teaching in academe will be offered for your consideration. Observations about domestic and wild animals will also be offered. I would like to do discussions at some point; we’ll see how often those can be managed.

Who am I?

Self-portrait of author: close-up of face resting on left hand. The picture is modified to look like a pencil sketch. — Self-portrait (with filter). Photo: Jeanne Grant

What kind of question is that? I don’t know how to answer that yet. In substitution, here are some of my creds. I have a Ph.D. in History from Berkeley, specializing in early modern and late modern Europe, specializing even further in late medieval Bohemia. I wrote a book called, For the Common Good: The Bohemian Land Law and the Beginning of the Hussite Revolution. (Don’t buy it.) I have been teaching history for quite a while, and I have taught millennia of history: world history “since the beginning” to 1500, the crusades, early modern Europe, late modern Europe, the Holocaust, Contemporary Europe, the Reformation, the medieval Church, Gender in Early Modern Europe, and even a couple classes that included travel (to Budapest and to Prague). I’ve earned a teaching award. I embrace online teaching and learning, which I now have to specify is “asynchronous” and I constantly work on improving my teaching. I also am chief editor of an online peer-reviewed journal called, The Middle Ground Journal: World History and Global Studies. And currently I am the chair of our small history department at a university with a unionized faculty.

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History professorin' work and tips, academe in general, and dogs and wildlife

People

Jeanne Grant, Ph.D.

@agoodspotheadscratcher

Historian and professor by trade, animal care-taker in my blood and my bones. I don’t hold many strong beliefs, but these I do: 1) reason is a human’s greatest asset; and 2) Han shot first. I promise not to write tripe unless context calls for it.