Today would have been Mom’s seventy-fifth birthday. Part of me wants to use the present-tense “is” in that sentence, since I still feel Mom’s presence in my life every day. (Today is not a good day to get me started on the vicissitudes of verb tense standards in different cultural situations.) In a way, it feels like that choice makes me focus on what might have been in our lives here if things had turned out differently, instead of what there is right now. Maybe,…
High schools nationwide ask athletes to sign coronavirus waivers in case they die (New York Daily News via MSN)Wisconsin teachers unions urge online-only start (WIFR) Several years ago, I was put in the uncomfortable position of having one of my students at the start of a semester die before the semester’s end. This would have been a serious problem under even the best of circumstances, but the college I was teaching this class at didn’t even tell me of the student’s passing; I only learned…
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…
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…
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…