Note: I’m going to cry while writing this. I’m going to continue crying while thinking about it. And I sense a gusher of tears is coming in the months ahead. I am not afflicted with the worst-case scenario anxiety that routinely sends me spiraling over the small but present probability of terrible things happening. In …
49 days to fall — movement & learning
It’s been a minute since my last #100DaysToFall post, which I’ll choose to attribute to my copious reading, family vacation to St. Louis, and general decision to attend to other things that felt more pressing. But here we are at the cusp of July, and the fall semester draws ever nearer. For this installment of …
68 days to fall: Are adjuncts human shields?
It’s been a little while since my last #100DaysToFall post; I’ve been working on an R&R for a teaching-centric article and, oh yeah, presenting at The Teaching Professor Conference (*in person*) in New Orleans. My mind is aswirl with all sorts of thoughts about teaching and pedagogy and higher education and equity and collaboration and …
82 days to fall: Caring in classrooms
I have so many thoughts swirling in my brain today, mostly because I’ve been consuming information at a faster-than-normal clip (thanks to all the driving I’ve done in the last week — more than 32 hours in the car over seven days). But for a #100DaysToFall post, I pulled out a book I read over …
84 days to fall: Trusting students (and ourselves)
We only control what we don’t trust. Glennon Doyle As my last post indicated, I’ve been traveling this week — first to (attempt to) visit my brother in Kansas City, then on to my parents’ house in northern Arkansas. I hadn’t seen family since Christmas 2019, in the before-COVID times, so this has been a …
88 days to fall: The hard truth is that we cannot reach everyone
Ostensibly about teaching, this #100DaysToFall series has been a delightful daily challenge to muse over what a teaching-obsessed college professor’s summer life looks like. For the most part, it looks nearly identical to the middle-of-the-semester life, save formal class meetings and the endless waves of guilt for not giving students feedback more quickly. I spend …
90 days to fall: Teaching Prof talk is soon!
Yesterday, I wrote about how I came to be an invited speaker (!!) at this year’s Teaching Professor Conference, which kicks off in just a couple of weeks. Today, I’m going to talk about the actual content of these TPC talks — how my thinking about teaching has been evolving over these last couple of …
91 days to fall: Finding my voice (and courage)
I wanted to share a little bit about the two presentations I’ll be giving in early June as part of the Teaching Professor Conference — a small portion of which is ACTUALLY HAPPENING IN PERSON (!!!) in New Orleans. I’ll talk more about this tomorrow, but today I thought I’d write a little about the …
92 days to fall: The joy of working in coffee shops
On Thursday, right around the time a short line of students, faculty, and the college president were about to process into our campus gym for the 20-something-th commencement of the week, the CDC announced that fully vaccinated Americans no longer needed to wear a mask indoors to protect themselves from COVID-19 (the disease, not the …
95 days to fall: Incomplete grades
I’ve been doing an awful lot of thinking lately about incomplete grades. Namely, this: How many incomplete grades can and/or should an instructor award before it becomes excessive? As I started thinking about this blog post a few days ago, I did some Googling around to see if there were other like-minded academics mulling over …