Category Archives: work

Think of the Children

The Case Against Summer Vacation (time.com) Last month when I wrote my “Open Letter to Retail Stores” about stores putting up back-to-school displays waytoo early in the summer and depressing children, one of my friends in NorthCarolina wrote back to tell me that many schools there are operating on a year-round basis, staggering student terms so that some students were starting school in July.  I talked with another North Carolinean about this, and although the economic advantage of keeping classrooms operating the whole year is…

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An Open Letter to Retail Stores

Dear retail store manager: Hello.  My name is Sean Shannon.  Although you probably don’t know me personally, if you have a retail store in the Toledo area, chances are I’ve shopped in your store.  (Unless you manage a Wal*Mart, in which case I will never ever ever set foot in your store, you union-busting, community-destroying, worker-neglecting, discriminatory pieces of crap.)  I like to comparison shop so I get the best value for my money, so throughout the course of a year I visit dozens upon dozens…

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The Other Business

This past week has been kind of momentous for my writing. On Sunday I got word that my essay “When Your Rape Doesn’t Count” has been accepted for the upcoming book Queering Sexual Violence, pending revisions the editor and I have yet to discuss. It’s been a while since I’ve had anything published, and this will be my first time to be published in an actual book. This inspired me to look at recent calls for academic essays, and I found one that’s kind of…

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Fads Fade Fast

Because the majority of my students fall between the ages of eighteen to twenty, I spend a fair amount of time on YouTube and Websites oriented towards that young adult demographic, so I can get a bit of a handle on what is popular in that age group. I’d watch television, but I just can’t stomach American Idol and its ilk, and the radio on my stereo — like so many parts of it — just isn’t working that well right now. I really need…

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Back to the grindstone

Tomorrow I begin teaching at MCCC again; I’ve got three sections of composition this term, all on Mondays and Wednesdays, and all at the satellite campus. I won’t be driving that much, and I’ll have lots of days off, but I’ve never taught more than one class in a day before and now I have three to deal with. This should be an interesting challenge for me, especially since I’ll be teaching MCCC’s Composition I as a fifteen-week course for the first time ever. Even…

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