After having lived nearly all of my life in medium-sized American cities, the transition to life here in Richland Center hasn’t always been easy. There’s a lot to love about this place — the quiet has helped me in more ways than I even thought possible — but as often as I miss my old haunts in Toledo, there are just as many times when I miss the conveniences of cities. Having to drive over an hour just to get to a Little Caesars can…
I was thirteen years old when the Berlin Wall fell, but I have a hard time thinking of myself as a child of the Cold War. I certainly heard a lot about how evil the Soviet Union was and all that, but I was totally unaware of how things like Russia’s food problems and Ronald Reagan’s bellicose rhetoric were pushing us to the verge of a hot war when I was still in grade school. More than that, despite how iconic the cartoons and jingles…
Today marked the start of the second week of online classes this semester. I’ve gotten some good feedback from some students who seem to be engaged as much as they ever were with the course material, but I also haven’t heard from a lot of students. I know that some of them are having difficulties right now — we have a high percentage of international students on this campus, and some of them are still stuck in limbo when it comes to returning to their…
[The following blog contains mentions of bullying and child abuse.] One of the things that often happens to children who grow up in abusive households is that we develop incredible sensitivity to other people’s anger, simply because we’re surrounded by it so much as we grow up that we hardly ever get a moment to relax. (This effect is compounded when, as happens to many of us, we also end up being frequent targets of bullying at school. Our difference in how we act marks…
I have left my apartment exactly once in the past week, just long enough to drop some recycling in the bin outside of my apartment complex. Our apartment doors open straight to the outside, so we don’t have any closed shared spaces here, and apart from the one student who was coming down some stairs as I dropped my recycling off, I haven’t seen another human being this past week. This wouldn’t be so ordinary for what became a Spring Break week for me when…