Friend-like Entities

It’s no secret that I’m a fully-fledged, all dues paid up, member of the “uses social networking” club. Good heavens, after all, I have a paid account on LiveJournal, I’m a “pro” on Flickr, I’m on Facebook, Twitter, and more recently on Pinterest. I have a Tumblr account I never use; I’m on Google+: you [...]

Profound Gifts

It takes a lot of courage to love an animal. How many human relationships do we enter into in the full knowledge that we will lose them in ten, twelve, fifteen, maybe twenty years (if we’re very lucky)? Yet when we bring pets into our lives, loss is part of the contract. One of my [...]

“Likes” is so Inadequate

Facebook is so strange. I’m on it because, well, basically I’ve tried everything, and FB does seem to be quite a nice way of keeping up to date with “RL” friends and relatives, or to see another side of some acquaintances from other social networks like Flickr or LJ. But it is very strange. For [...]

Thoughts on the Shadow Scholar

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published this article, written under a pseudonym, by someone who makes a (rather good) living writing papers for students who cheat. He accuses us (we teachers) of being ignorant of how much of this goes on. In fact, I was perfectly well aware that such services exist; you only [...]

The Invisible Curriculum

The other night, one of my students told me that I had made the most incredible comment on his essay, the best comment he’d ever had from a prof. No, I hadn’t told him that his essay was the best I’d ever read or that his use of the semi-colon was sophisticated. I had simply [...]

Butterflies and Glee

No, not that Glee; the emotional one. I love this time of year, and, for me, as I’m sure it is for many or most in my profession, this is the true “New Year.” January? Who needs it – it’s the dead of winter. No, the new year begins in September, with the energy of [...]

My Heavenly Library

Today, in one of those “questions” memes on my Other Blog, I asked a friend to tell me what would be in a library in heaven, where any book you could imagine exists, even ones never written. She wants all the poetry Keats would have written if he’d lived to be eighty-five (me too!), and [...]

Sunday Rant – A Plea for the New Media

Are there any Math teachers out there who still refuse to use a calculator? Who still use a slide-rule and memorize times-tables? To me, that’s the same as the way many of my colleagues, not just in my department, but everywhere, seem to be in a state of denial about the importance of new developments [...]

Weekend? What weekend?

Another thing I dislike* about my wonderful, chosen, profession as a college teacher is the fact that I can rarely enjoy a day off during term time. There is always homework: marking, prep, reading. Or thinking about homework. Even when I make time to do something else, the work that needs to be done is [...]

Certainty

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination (John Keats) My creative writing students are a passionate bunch, and many of them are activists and advocates of causes. Last night, I asked them to think about things they are _not_ certain of, because they seem [...]