I’ve mentioned before that whereas most people tend to be more reflective on “the year that was” around the changing of the calendar year, I’ve always done more of that on my birthday: Figuring out what I did right over the previous year of my life, what I could have done better, and what I want to do over the coming year. Needless to say, with my birthday being on the eighteenth of March, thinking ahead to the coming year when I was going through…
As an English teacher and a writer, there are few things in the world I find scarier than when I temporarily lose my ability to come up with the right words. Everyone has moments where they can’t find the right word to describe a concept, or blank on someone’s name (I do that a lot, since my ability to connect names and faces has always been kind of weak). Due to a number of factors (my upbringing probably being tops on the list), I also…
Although last month’s polar vortex wasn’t as difficult to get through as the spell of beyond-frigid weather we had here a couple of years ago, having to deal with a prolonged period of super-cold temperatures was still incredibly difficult. What makes matters worse is that because of the pandemic, I didn’t have to leave my apartment at all during that time, so the cold weather really wasn’t a burden to me on a practical level. Psychologically, though, I couldn’t wait for the polar vortex to…
Months before the current semester started, I was asked to decide if I wanted to teach in-person or virtually this term. This was before any vaccines for COVID-19 had even been announced, let alone approved and rolled out, so I didn’t have much trouble deciding to do online learning for yet another semester. After I made that decision, that gave me a lot of room to work with, since I haven’t taught in-person classes over the summer here in Wisconsin yet, so by teaching online…
I was part of that generation of young people who arguably got to experience Bill Cosby at the best possible time; Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids was still in reruns when I was in my earliest years, and the first years of The Cosby Show started right when I got to watch prime time television on a regular basis. My parents already owned a couple of Cosby’s comedy albums on vinyl, and I kept picking up more of them on cassette tape when I…