I officially graduated from my DFP orientation today. I can now work on preparing lessons pretty much full-time until classes start on August 9, except I have one more all-day DF orientation thing to go to on Thursday... And now you're asking DFP, DF, WTF??? Or else you've already gotten bored and clicked over to Go Fug Yourself to find out what fashion atrocity Sienna Miller is currently perpertrating (sample quote from one of today's entries on the site: "The makers of Kate Mara's dress would like to apologize to Ms. Mara, to the fans, and to the fine people at the premiere of Stardust: The Movie With Tons Of Famous People In It Like Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert DeNiro, Yet Which Somehow I Had No Idea Was Even Being Made.") Anywho, the military loves loves loves abbreviations. So DF stands for Department of the Faculty, DFP is Department of the Faculty - Physics, the U.S. Air Force Academy is USAFA, which is pronounced you-soff-a, if I go to a conference, I'm going TDY, and I have no idea what that means, and so on and so forth. So what happened today was that I finished by physics deparment orientation, but I still have one more general faculty orientation thing to go to this week. Most of the orientation stuff has centered on the learning focused approach to teaching that is being pushed across the Academy. Learning focus is a teaching technique that, tautologically, focuses on what students are learning rather than on what teachers are teaching. It seems obvious, but most traditional college teaching has been based on the assumption that students are just dump trucks waiting for teachers to shovel knowledge into them. Under that assumption, anything the teacher writes on the board is new knowledge for the student. But recent studies have shown that students don't learn that way. Just because something gets written on the board doesn't mean that students know it. Learning focus says that you have to actively engage the students in the learning process. Prompt them to arrive at knowledge rather than feeding it to them, motivate them to want to learn rather than just have them sit zombified in class just because their major or a general education requirement says they have to be there. There are also some other aspects that are a bit more difficult for me to see. One of the things is that you have to form a trust relationship with students, which in itself is fairly noncontroversial. In order to have a good learning environment, you have to trust students and they have to trust you. But one aspect of the trust relationship, at least according to one of the books we had to read, is that we should try to avoid forcing students to do work by grading them on it. So, if we want students to read the textbook, we shouldn't have a graded quiz every few days to make sure they are keeping up with their reading. We should trust that they are doing the reading. But the thing is, I've been a student, and no matter how exciting or stimulating the class is, I'm not reading that stinking textbook. I still hate reading textbooks, even when I understand what they're talking about. So I don't know if I can ever see that happening - motivating students to read their text just through trusting and inspiring them. But who knows, maybe I'm more inspiring than I know.

The Thing Called Love, River Phoenix's last movie (I think, Wikipedia says it was one of his last roles), also starring Sandra Bullock and Samantha Mathis, who is totally off the radar now but gets a blue ribbon for awesomeness if for no other reason than her role in Pump Up the Volume, is an amazing underrated movie about up-and-coming country music stars and about Dermot Mulroney constantly getting screwed over, both movie-worthy subjects in my book. Anyway, from that movie came one of my favorite songs, "Blame It On Your Lyin Cheatin Cold Dead-Beatin Two-Timing Double-Dealin Me-Mistreating Lovin Heart", known more often by it's short name "Blame It On Your Heart". Below is the movie version of the song, and below that is the real version of the song, by Patty Loveless.

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