Being a Teacher

Classroom teaching has been one of the best experiences of my life; I find that the sense of “giving back” that goes along with teaching is near the top of my list of ways to have a really good time! I love the engagement and interactions with students, and I love to watch them lighting up with new knowledge, developing competence, and growing in confidence.

No matter what, so long as I can think and communicate, I will never stop being a teacher. It may or may not always (or even usually) be in a classroom setting; there are other ways and places to teach. I keep plugging away at this blog, for example, as a way to do some teaching. I have always had a voracious appetite for reading (my students know that I do my best to pass that on to them!), and this blog allows me to do some filtering through the onslaught of internet postings about various topics, and to convey what I think are the best and most interesting, by way of the “del.icio.us” linking service. Yesterday, I added a new widget thing to the left column of the page that allows you to see the “cloud” of tags that I use, so that you can easily click a tag and find all the websites and articles I have saved with that particular tag. Also, if you just click on the “del.icio.us” link, itself, you can look at all my links, with their tags, either as a list or as a cloud, or maybe in other ways I have not yet figured out.

I know that many of the students I have taught are fascinated by forensic and criminal stuff (serial killers seem to be a major preoccupation of undergrads, I have found…); what could be more interesting than psychopathy, for example? You can get to some good websites and articles related to this stuff by clicking the tags, or going to the actual del.icio.us list, where there are some related groups, like the “forensic-criminal” group, or the “psychopathy-narcissism” group. There are also a bunch of tags and a couple of groups related to mindfulness, meditation, mind/brain, and related topics, and several related to psychiatric diagnoses, and psychotherapy… gender… politics… recipes.

In addition to the “del.icio.us” links, there are links (mostly science-related) posted beneath the sets of “del.icio.us” links, under the heading “crimlawdoc’s shared items.”

Also, I just discovered that this blog has a built-in search engine, at the top of the page, on the left side. I have begun editing these posts with tags, or keywords, so that if you want to run a search on some topic, the relevant posts will show up.

I hope that you will do some browsing among these links; I hope that they will give you new information, new ideas, and maybe even some challenges to your current thoughts in some area or another... Maybe you’ll even find something that will help you in actual coursework! Feel free to post a comment if any of that ever happens; I love to get comments.