[The following blog contains mentions of bullying and child abuse.] I have a “that’s not funny” reaction to a lot of viral videos and memes, simply because they display deep-rooted problems in our broader culture that need to be addressed seriously. There are certainly boatloads of funny videos out there on the Internet, but a lot of the stuff people laugh at on YouTube is of people with deep psychological issues. Not only do I find it cruel for people to laugh at those kinds…
James Lipton, ‘Inside the Actors Studio’ Host, Dies at 93 (Daily Variety) I started teaching at around the end of Chappelle’s Show being part of the larger American cultural zeitgeist, so when Dave Chappelle broke his silence after leaving his Comedy Central show by appearing on Inside the Actors Studio, I pretty much had to watch. I’d heard of Inside the Actors Studio and seen commercials about it, but I hadn’t paid it much attention since I’ve never really been a film person. Something about…
It’s not exactly a secret that a lot of the coffeehouse baristas and restaurant waitstaff you may run into during the course of an average day are people, like me, with graduate degrees. Many of them went through the unadulterated hell of graduate school, and all the associated trials and tribulations (student loan debt being the most pernicious of all), with the intent of staying at colleges and universities as an educator themselves. (This is probably more common in the humanities, but it happens in…
House Democrats Grill Betsy DeVos Over Denying Student Borrower Relief (NPR) Today is the start of Finals Week here, and as has been the case throughout my teaching career, I wound up spending most of the past week trying to coach my students, most of whom are in their first semester of college, through the challenges of this difficult time. Even as someone who enjoyed the academic side of my college experience more than most, I remember all too well the unique stresses that those…
The Rough Draft Diaries with Haley Taylor: “Violins Under the Bed” (wgte.org) There was a popular tweet a few weeks ago about how school spelling bees are traumatic because so many of us can remember when, and how, we got eliminated from them even decades after they happened. I shared my own story from a fifth grade spelling bee almost thirty-five years earlier, when the word I got was “bouquet,” I had the letters lined up in my head the way they should have been,…