I will warn you this post has little to do with higher education and more to do with something that has been annoying me. I would like to tell you it is something really important to world peace, betterment of mankind, or even something witty. Nope. It is about credit card commercials and the close-up shot of their card being swiped by a customer.

It’s backwards! The card is scanned so the logo of the credit card is visible, but when it is swiped this way, the magnetic strip is not going through the credit card machine. It started with Chase Freedom. I am a Chase customer and it drove me crazy every time I watched the commercials. Now, Tina Fey is doing it with her AmEx!  While I am a loyal customer of American Express, I shudder when I am forced to watch this atrocity happen over and over again in their #EveryDayMoments campaign.

So what is the deal? Do they think we don’t care? Truth is, my guess is that the general public doesn’t care. Is it vanity? Is their name so important that if we didn’t see their logo we would not believe the message?  Is this tactic designed to inspire me to leave my comfy spot on the couch to go shopping with my American Express card?  Not today, AmEx.

Enough of this rant. By the way, Disaronno, stop spinning the square lid on your Amaretto bottle clockwise to remove it.  Guess no one ever told their advertising agency about leftie loosie, rightie tightie.

When it comes to ways of assessing student learning, we in higher education typically fall into a couple of tried-and-true, boring and inefficient ways methods. We tend to gravitate to the old standbys: tests, quizzes, and the occasional written assignment. But we try not to use too many of those written assignments because, heaven forbid, they do not self-grade in the LMS.

Check out the Periodic Table of Storytelling.

Periodic Table of Storytelling
You can get this for your use. Click on the image to go to the website to order.

Harkening back to the dreaded periodic table of elements from chemistry class, this is a new spin on storytelling. One of my colleagues at Colby Community College, Dr. Michael Thompson, uses storytelling in his classes and has found it to be an effective way of determining a student’s acquisition of knowledge. When I viewed the table, I chose the Rad – Getting things past the radar element as it appealed to my penchant for trying to get things past the radar, or at least fly under it.

So, next time you are trying to assess student learning, have your student select one of the elements from the chart and write a short story about the content they are being assessed upon. Although it’s true that it will not self grade, you might be pleasantly surprised by the stories your students tell!