Chris Martin. Welcome to this Kosmos Online podcast. I'm Chris ...

getting that student up to speed. In other cases, sometimes there’d be an extenuating
circumstance, sometimes a student’s not very good with math, or not a strong writer. That’s
when you start investigating other resources that your department offers. A lot of universities
have a writing center that is specifically there to help students polish up on their writing skills.
When I’ve encountered that kind of student in the past, I’ll normally give them the contact
information, provide them with directions and get their next paper taken through the writing
center before they turn it in.
CM. Many students are unaware of those resources, or they’re only peripherally aware of it.
You’re specifically directing them to that, that can be a big help. Has that generally been
successful for these students?
PM. For the most part it has. I see an improvement in writing over the semester for students that
I’ve sent off to that resource. I have had some circumstances, especially in the more technicalintensive
classes where large groups of students are having trouble with the mathematical econ.
In those circumstances I’ve set aside time outside of class where maybe five or ten students can
come and meet me during office hours and we’ll find a classroom and work through it again. It’s
really a case-by-case basis, but trying to be flexible to accommodate the needs of students, it’s a
good teaching practice, because at the end of the semester you want them to learn the material.
CM. In a way that’s your job. I wanna just comment on two things that strike me as particularly
valuable: delegation and economies of scale. The writing center or the math tutor represents
delegation that you yourself don’t have to be an individualized helper, necessarily to the student
because you have your own demands of time. You can’t necessarily be spending hours and hours
of time with a single student. Then, with the math you mentioned, helping ten students at once
takes really not that much more effort than helping one student. That’s a way you could really
leverage your time. Another thing you mentioned that I felt was really valuable pointing out was
the notes. Phil, I wonder, do you think that most students coming into college have had a class in
note-taking or study skills?
PM. At the undergraduate level definitely not. Maybe very rarely you’ll get some student who
had a higher-level, advanced-placement style course where they are pretty advanced at taking
notes. But for the most part, it’s a very new concept for students that are coming in.
CM. I think that this is a decision, not necessarily of the individual instructors but of the
institutions. It’s certainly out there, but there’s rarely a course actually in it. I think the only
course I’ve ever had formally in it as in middle school, it was woven into a social studies course.
There’s a book, and you probably have other ones too, I believe the author is Pauk, it’s How to
Study in College. We can find that and post it on the website when we do the podcast, but it’s an
extremely useful book, I found it helpful for graduate school, which, hey a little embarrassing,
but it’s better to get good techniques at some point rather than never. One of the techniques that