[The following blog contains mentions of suicide.] UNC-Chapel Hill cancels classes after police investigate reported suicides (Charlotte News-Observer via Yahoo! News) Throughout my teaching career, I’ve dealt with students from a very wide range of upbringings and socioeconomic statuses. Trying to pinpoint any single factor as being primarily determinative of students’ success in college, regardless of how “success” is defined (a whole separate argument) is foolhardy, but if you forced me to pick one thing to focus on when it comes to helping incoming college…

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This past weekend, as I was decompressing from the work week, it felt strange to recognize that even though I’d taught for six full days of the nascent fall semester, I had yet to teach a full week. Colleges set their schedules differently — I’m still getting used to the much longer winter breaks here in Wisconsin, presumably to keep us all inside for most of January, when the cold weather and roads can be incredibly dangerous — and state law requires that we start…

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When I set up the schedules for my classes before the start of each semester, I always try to paint my plans with the broadest brush strokes possible. I have a few set activities I always do at the start of every semester to help acclimate students to my classes (and college life in general), and setting due dates for major assignments ahead of time is always a necessity, but I’ve always tried to be as improvisational of a teacher as possible, adapting to the…

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Texas Parent Rips Off Teacher’s Mask in School Altercation (Newsweek via msn.com) Today is three years to the day that I left Colorado for Wisconsin, and I didn’t need one of my social media apps to remind me of that fact this morning, since this day on the calendar is always going to be special to me for that reason. What I did need reminding of, though, was that it was on this day last year that I asked my friends on that social media…

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