Blog 1

To the readers of Blog 2. This is the post I wrote first, lost, and now have found.
Today is December 9, 2010. I have just finished watching my P.S.399 students take their final exam. And while I was watching, this blog came to mind. Funny, isn't it, how fast those things happen sometimes?

Most of the posts on this blog will be about the courses I teach. I teach three, really, although the registrar's office calls it four. I teach a course in American Government. PS 101, emphasizing the essential background and the major national institutions, falls in the fall term. PS 102, emphasizing first the politics attendant on our kind of system and then the policies that kind of politics produces, hibernates during the winter term. That's one course, really, offered in two terms and that is the reason my own recordkeeping differs from that at the registrar's office.

I teach a course about political psychology (PS 399) in the fall term and follow it with a course about public policy (PS414) in the winter term. Issues that do fall or should fall in the personal and social arenas are the natural material for 399. Issues that do fall or should fall in the social and political arenas are the natural material for 414. The overlap you notice there is the subject matter of the last two weeks of 399 and the first two weeks of 414. Nifty, isn't it?

I have two other topics in mind for this blog. The larger one is the educational context of my work and I mean "context" broadly, so that it includes international, national, public, private, and all the levels of schooling. All of which, by the way, I have taught, from elementary to doctoral levels. The smaller one is the practice of pedagogy. I teach a certain way; have certain goals; certain joys and sorrows peculiar to the way I teach. I'd like to mull those over with you--as of this moment, only my political psychology class even knows of the existence of this blog--looking over my shoulder and commenting as you will. All alumni of any of those courses are hereby invited to join in. Anyone else too, of course.

If I write a post here that seems, as I read it over, as if it would make a useful addition to my other blog, I will probably post it there as well as here. This one will be a good deal more circumspect, bearing in mind, as Stan Freburg says, "the tiny tots." This blog, because of the audience, is more a part of Portland State University, my colleagues there, and my students. The other one is just me, writing about whatever I want to write about.

Blogspot.com provides, along with screens like this, "pages," where the introductory material may be put. I plan to write five of those pages: one for each of the topics I have referred to so far.

In honor of Chip Kelly and my Oregon Ducks, I am going to try a "win the day" approach to this blog. I am not entirely sure what that means, but it means at least, that there will be standards for every day I post, and I will try to acquit myself well--that is what "win" means when you don't have an opponent--every day I post.