Naked teaching, indeed. It's the evening before the first day of classes in a new semester; the stuff of which nightmares of naked teaching are made. I never actually have THAT dream. My nightmares tend to run more along the lines of showing up to class sans syllabus, sans plans, and with an unappreciative audience that arrives late and throws things at me. Usually, it's not that bad in real life; however, I don't typically think of my first day of classes as being particularly meaningful.
SO, I have big plans for tomorrow. I'm using a "pre-assessment" for the first time in my Logic course. I've taught Logic for years and years, but have always shied away from anything that seems like a test on the first day--especially because Logic, to some folks, can look like another language (or, worse yet, like math!). This time, though, I'm determined to give the students a sense of what they should be able to do with the tools we'll learn in class, and I hope it also gives me a sense of their talents and challenges so that I can better think about the activities of the course. Tune in tomorrow for the big news on how it worked!
“An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellectual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us.” ― John Dewey, Experience and Nature
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