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Category Archives: Teaching

2010-2011 Course Outlines

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

This year I am teaching three courses: FYSM 1506 Topics in the Study of Societies: “Power and Violence” [pdf]–this course will focus, in the semester, on social and political theories of violence and its relation to society and, in the second semester, on a variety of “substantive” topics, drawing upon movies, fiction, and television. LAWS [...]

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Fall 2009/Winter 2010 Syllabi

Thursday, July 30, 2009

For those interested, I have posted the syllabi for my two courses: FYSM 1502 B Topics in Legal Studies: Animals, The Environment and the Law [pdf] FYSM 1502 P Topics in Legal Studies: State, Law and Violence [pdf] Both courses are first year seminars, meaning that enrollment is capped at thirty students in the B [...]

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Animal Studies and Evil

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Elsewhere, in a discussion about using the word evil in relation to factory farms, I brought up an incident from the class for high school students I taught a month or so ago. We had just finished watching the documentary “Death on a Factory Farm” (if HBO asks “HBO Canada or HBO USA,” choose the [...]

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The Animals Class

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

As those who bothered to read my admittedly boring last post may have noticed, I’m in the midst of doing the final administrative and organizational matters for the “Enriched Mini-Course” I am teaching in early May. Among the various activities (it is supposed to be “hands-on”) I had wanted the students (mostly grade eight) to [...]

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Excessively ambitious to-do list

Monday, April 20, 2009

Write overview for first year seminar on “Animals, Environment and the Law” Finish planning the course on animals for the Enriched Mini-Course Program: guest speakers, teaching notes, videos Finish chapter on Locke Convert finished chapter on Locke into conference paper Finish chapter on anthropomorphism Convert finished chapter on anthropomorphism into conference paper Finish paper on [...]

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Introducing High School Students to Animal Studies

Thursday, December 11, 2008

I’ve been selected to teach a course to high school students – grades eight to twelve, I believe – as part of a “mini-enrichment course” designed to get students interested in going to university (and to realize how utterly terrible high school is, I imagine). The course is a week long (Monday to Friday). The [...]

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Five Fun Books

Friday, November 14, 2008

William Ian Miller (2006) Eye for an Eye – the discussion of why a penis is worth three wergelds (a wergeld is a “man-price”) while the middle finger is the least valuable finger is worth the price of the book. Short answer, flipping the bird is obscene, but losing your dick in battle is even [...]

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2008-2009 Teaching

Sunday, July 27, 2008

I’ve finally finished drafts of my course outlines for the coming academic year. FYSM 1502 is a brand new course, part of the ArtsOne program for incoming first year students; LAWS 3005 has undergone slight revisions; and LAWS 3305 is rather revamped – a whole section on state theory and a greater focus on the [...]

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More Teaching Evaluations

Monday, June 16, 2008

It would seem that I have gone from significantly below average to above average insofar as my teaching evaluations are concerned. (We’ll ignore for now that teaching evaluations don’t evaluate much of anything and are largely a silly bureaucratic exercise that amounts to nothing more than useless “performance indicators” – just like all of our [...]

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Student Evaluations

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Queen’s sent me my evaluations today. Considering it was my first time teaching the course (full year classical social theory) and my first time teaching at the university, that my evaluations were thoroughly average (i.e., pretty much near the departmental mean for every evaluated aspect), I guess that isn’t too bad. Written in comment on [...]

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