I’m reading such an interesting book about teaching: Michael Newman’s Teaching Defiance: Stories and Strategies for Activist Educators. I already did a piece about it in a recent issue of the newsletter, but I’m interviewing Michael for a Magna Online Seminar in April (for information, see www.magnapubs.com/calendar/194.html), and for that I need to do a careful, thoughtful read of the book.

I asked a high school friend why he likes video games so much. “It’s fun because at the level you’re on you can do some things but not others. You really want to learn how to do those things you can’t so you can move on to the next level. And you feel like you’re so close … you just keep trying and trying and then you get it.”

Are you one of those faculty members (truly we are legion) who has trouble talking too much in classroom discussions? I know, everything we have to say is so wonderful and so needs to be said. But we all know that the more we talk, the less we hear from students (and that applies both literally and figuratively). Short of duct tape, how do we get ourselves talking less?

One of the embarrassing parts of doing The Teaching Professor newsletter is discovering how much good material I miss even though it seems as though I’m always reading. Just yesterday I was reading a book for which I’ve agreed to write a foreword, and there was a reference to an article I should not have missed. It’s in a journal I regularly read, but apparently I was asleep at the wheel or reading with very dirty glasses.

There’s a lot of stress associated with academic positions. At least faculty report that they are stressed. In a 2003 survey of 782 British academics 70 percent reported that they found their jobs stressful, and 75 percent said those levels of stress had increased across the past five years. (These percentages are a bit higher than surveys done of U.S. academics.)

I’m preparing for a Magna online seminar interview that I’m doing in March with a very well respected adult educator who’s an expert on something called transformational learning. Actually, the label isn’t all that jargonesque—this is the kind of learning that transforms, changes who you are and how you live. It does that by encouraging learners to question what they have assumed and taken for granted. They might question beliefs, values, or perspectives. Through that critical questioning they may arrive at a different set of beliefs, but the process itself makes learners more open and permeable.

Hi and welcome to the Teaching Professor Blog! This is a new adventure for us (that’s the folks at Magna who are supporting the blog and me, Maryellen Weimer, long-time editor of the Teaching Professor newsletter). Here’s how we figure: You don’t write a monthly newsletter on teaching, publish a family of higher education newsletters, or sponsor conferences and online seminars without feeling that you have access to a wide set of resources, information and ideas that could profitably be shared in a less formal venue like a blog.