Category Archives: personal

Agonizing

personal, politics, teaching 2020.07.06 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Wisconsin Breaks Single-Day COVID-19 Case Record (Patch via Yahoo! News)‘A Nightmare’: Georgia Tech Faculty Push Back Against In-Person Reopening Plans (NPR) I’ve always been a very passionate person, and one of the advantages of working as a teacher is that my job allows me to channel my passions in very productive ways. I care very deeply about improving the lives of other people, and my work allows me to do that improvement in a very hands-on way, something that lets me get immediate feedback on…

Consideration

personal, teaching 2020.06.22 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

The Virginia Tech Massacre happened between when I finished grad school and when I started my first post-graduation teaching position. When I went to orientation for that position in August, the massacre seemed to be on many instructors’ minds, and for good reason. There was some programming in the orientation about what to do in order to defuse bad situations on campus, but there didn’t seem to be any talk about trying to move classes online in the wake of concern about campus shootings. Even…

Head Above Water

personal, writing 2020.06.15 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

This coming weekend will mark the first time I’ll get to teach Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, since I’m using it as the framework for the creativity workshop I get to run this summer. Appropriately enough, I’ll be doing this nearly twenty years to the day — the 8th of July, 2000 — when I first started reading The Artist’s Way myself. That book wound up changing the trajectory of my life in a major way over the following twenty weeks, and it’s hard…

Bear-ing the Summer

personal, teaching 2020.06.08 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

For all the stories during the pandemic of animals “taking over” spaces that had been largely abandoned during our collective self-isolation, I have to say that I wasn’t expecting to wake up today to news of a bear roaming on our parent campus. Our semester ended a couple of weeks ago, so there would have been a skeleton crew there even without the pandemic going on, but stories like this have a way of sticking with me. Platteville is over an hour’s drive from here,…

(Attempts at) Planning for the New Normal

personal, teaching 2020.05.25 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

The worst end to a semester I ever had was the fall semester of 2017. My last day on campus was just four days before I flew to Colorado to begin so much of my life anew, and as I sat in the teachers’ lounge late that night, after everyone else had gone home, I started bawling my eyes out. Parts of me were definitely looking forward to that plane ride and the opportunities waiting for me at its end, but I was also frightened…