New Year, New Casebook!

Next week, after a two-year hiatus, I will embark on my sixth semester teaching contracts.  This time, for the first time, I will be using Christina Kunz (left) and Carol Chomsky's (right) casebook, Contracts: A Contemporary Approach.  I am looking forward to returning to teaching contracts and especially to trying out a new approach.  

In addition to the new casebook, I am also incorporating clickers into my course for the first time.  That is, I will be polling my students and giving them little un-graded mini-quizzes.  They will give me answers by pressing buttons on their clickers, and I will see the results immediately.  Because the clickers enable the students to participate anonymously, they need not be nervous about getting the wrong answers and I hope that this technology will help me quickly take the temperature of my students and see if the material is sinking in.  

I have colleagues who find one casebook and stick with it, but I am a firm believer in the switcheroo.  I've learned a great deal from teaching out of each of the casebooks I have used prior to this one.  I expect that I will learn a great deal from an intense immersion into Chomsky's and Kunz's approaches to teaching contracts.  And I am eager to see how and the extent to which m students make use of their casebook's interactive features.

But mostly, the new casebook will give me the opportunity to cover some cases that I haven't used before, and new cases mean new limericks!

Stay tuned (bwhahahaha!)

[JT]