L.G. Estrella's Blog, page 55

Class Sizes

How many students are in a class can have a powerful impact on how effective a teacher can be. Students each have their own level of ability and optimum way of learning. Having too many students in a class can make it far more difficult to teach any of them well.

Consider a class in which half of the students learn best in a more structured environment and half the students learn best in an unstructured environment. Even a simple division like this means a large increase in the amount of work...

Poke It With A Stick! vs Why Would You Do That?

Have you ever felt the urge to poke something with a stick when you really, really know that you shouldn’t? Perhaps it was one of your siblings. Perhaps it was a cat or a dog. For your sake, I hope it wasn’t a tiger. If you’ve ever felt this urge, then you can probably empathise with the type of character that I’ve come to think of as Poke It With A Stick! (PIWAS) characters.

PIWAS characters are the kind of people who simply cannot let sleeping dogs lie. If there is a button to push, they’ll...

The Unconventional Heroes Series Part 3: Another Update

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about the next part ofThe Unconventional Heroes Series. For those of you who haven’t read the series, it’s a humorous fantasy about a necromancer named Timmy who is trying to earn his way to a pardon by taking on some tricky missions that only someone with his particular set of skills can handle. If you like my sense of humour, I think you’ll definitely enjoy it.

The first part of the series,Two Necromancers, a Bureaucrat, and an Elf, came out in Ju...

Some Advice To Students

Having lectured at a major university in Australia, I thought I’d offer a few words of advice to any students out there:

Do not wait until the end of semester to ask questions.I’ve lost count of how often students have waited until the end of semester to ask me about things that they don’t understand. Not only does this not give them a lot of time to learn what they need to but it also makes the rest of the material much harder to understand since not understanding one thing can often make i...

Is This Test Good? How To Evaluate Psychological Tests

Psychological tests have become increasingly popular and influential. There are tests of intelligence and personality, along with tests designed to diagnose various mental disorders. Given the way that these tests are used (e.g., college admission and clinical treatment), it is critical that we understand how to evaluate the quality of a test.

But what makes a test good or bad?

The simplest way to answer this question is to examine two questions:

Does the test measure something accurately an...

How To Write Action Scenes

Action scenes are not for the faint of heart. A good action scene can have readers on the edge of their seats, but a bad action scene can leave a reader more interested in puppies and kittens than in bullets and explosions. To make your job as a writer easier, allow me to offer a few helpful hints.

Bigger is always better.Bigger explosions are always better. Bigger guns are always better. Bigger swords are always better. If you’re not sure what to do, always go bigger, not smaller. Why have...

Students Everywhere

One of the more amusing things about having been a university lecturer is that I have met quite a few of my former students outside of university.

Here are a few examples:

I have had a car pull over next to me while I was walking home, so that one of my former students could say hello to me before they told me what they’d gotten up to since they took my class. I have met former students at no less than four different stores of a certain popular retailer while buying things. In every single c...

Growing With An Author

One of the most interesting and rewarding experiences that a reader can have is growing with an author. By this I mean the experience that a reader has when they read something that an author has written and then continue to follow that author as their career continues. Perhaps the most recent example of this on a large scale are the readers who grew up with J. K. Rowling and her Harry Potter series.

The experience of growing with an author is fascinating because of the interplay between the...

Gods and Fiction

Mythology has long been a source of inspiration for my writing. One of the reasons for this is that in many myths, the gods are very much like people. True, the gods are often depicted as incredibly powerful, but they are also given very human flaws.

Myths embody something about the people who created them. The way that people saw the world and believed the world to work inspired the mythology they created to account for the world around them. In that sense, the gods that people had were ofte...

Unlearning American English and Accent Confusion

When I first moved to Australia, I came fully equipped with English. Alas, it was the wrong kind of English. Nowhere was this more obvious than in all the spelling questions I got wrong in elementary school because, apparently, spelling things the same way in English across the entire world would be too easy.

I can distinctly remember the aggravation I felt whenever I was tripped over by yet another word that was spelled differently in Australia, such as humour, colour, honour, metre, centre,...