[The following blog contains mentions of illness and death.] One of the near-constants of my teaching career is that I’ve been a last-second hire at pretty much every institution I’ve ever taught at. I’d like to think that this is because I keep myself flexible when it comes to this stuff, but I also recognize that it may just be that there are so many instructors who are better than I am, and I end up being a teacher-of-last-resort on the hiring front. If nothing…
One of the techniques I teach my students in nearly all of my classes is that when they take notes, whether in class or while doing work outside of class, they should try to put their notes in their own words as much as possible. The reason for this is simple: When you are able to paraphrase someone else’s ideas, that shows likely understanding of the ideas themselves. On the other hand, when your “understanding” is limited to repeating someone else’s phrasing (as best you…
[The following blog contains mentions of child abuse and bullying.] I bought my first Nintendo system (the original NES) when I was thirteen years old, around the time of my life when the abuse I was dealing with, both at home and at school, was near its peak. Really, for the first twenty-five years of my life, save my first all-too-brief stint at college, I was constantly being told by nearly all the people around me that I would always be a colossal fuck-up, and…
When I was hired to teach English here in Richland Center in 2018, the University of Wisconsin colleges were in the middle of a process called regionalization. Previously, all the colleges (except for the flagship campus in Madison) reported to an entity called the University of Wisconsin System, but under the new organization, each region had its own central campuses, with smaller campuses nearby effectively becoming branches of the larger campus. As such, even though I was hired by the University of Wisconsin-Richland, I began…
After being a part of the University of Wisconsin System for nearly four years now, I don’t think I’ll get in trouble for saying that in my experience, the only constant for us is change. I showed up here in Richland Center in 2018 as the regionalization process turned our campus into a branch of the larger campus in Platteville (they gave me lots of free swag with the old pre-regionalization logo when I got here), and just as that process seemed to be entering…