Category Archives: personal

The Weight of the World

personal, politics, teaching 2022.04.25 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

[The following blog contains discussion of suicide.] Only 29% of hospitalised COVID-19 patients fully well one year on: Study (channelnewsasia.com)It’s not over: COVID-19 cases are on the rise again in US (sfgate.com)Climate anxiety and high school: How young people are coping (ABC News on MSN) One of the things I’m testing out with my College Writing students this semester is a term-long exercise where students are expected to keep up semi-regular email correspondence with me. In addition to helping students learn the formal and social…

Tuned Out

personal, television 2022.04.18 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

I’ve blogged before about how a lot of my early love for learning came from the television shows I watched when I was very young. Children’s television staples like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood had a huge influence on me, of course, but even my love of early-1980’s game shows led to me wanting to understand this thing called “math” that was responsible for all the contestants getting happy or sad during those old weekday morning blocks on the major broadcast networks. Contrary to…

Stuck

personal 2022.02.07 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

[The following blog contains mentions of bullying and other abuse.] One of the first things you learn in therapy is that painful memories never really go away. If something painful sticks in your head for any reason, it’s practically impossible to get it unstuck. Often times, the most effective coping skill is to develop mental mechanisms to soften the relived traumas of those past memories: Remembering better times, or recalling that you have people who care about you in the present, or just recognizing that…

Déjà Rêvé

personal, transgender, videogames 2022.01.24 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

As I’ve been looking to both improve my mental health and build my Twitch channel, one of the video games I’ve had my eyes on is Unpacking, a puzzle-style game where you unpack items from boxes to organize various living spaces. I’ve enjoyed puzzle games all my life, and the low-key nature of Unpacking definitely places it in the “cozy game” genre that I’ve been trying to play more of, to help me maximize the benefits of using video games to help me unwind from…

Out Of Gas

personal 2022.01.17 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

One of the things that made last year so rough on me was the fact that I experienced the first significant burnout of my teaching career. As our spring semester was drawing to a close in mid-May, and I got through the last of my regular class sessions before finals week started, I started feeling the kind of exhaustion that normally doesn’t happen to me until after I’ve finished reviewing all my students’ final papers and submitting grades. That post-semester crash happens to me every…