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More important than any topic I teach is teaching my students how to learn. Facts can change. The percentage of Christians in the United States that I teach first-year students today may be different by the time they graduate. The…
Continue readingI’ve been doing some nonfiction creative writing recently (you can see my latest piece here, if you’d like). And it’s been an interesting exercise in curation, a term most closely associated with the world of art history, but now used…
Continue readingA while back I read an interesting, if not somewhat problematic, book called Hunt, Gather, Parent. The author, NPR science reporter Michaeleen Doucleff, went all around the world, along with her young daughter, trying to learn how people parent. She…
Continue readingMore important than any topic I teach is teaching my students how to learn. Facts can change. The percentage of Christians in the United States that I teach first-year students today may be different by the time they graduate. The…
Continue readingRecently a colleague shared with me the concept of “ungrading,” written about eloquently in a couple of blog posts by writing instructor Jesse Strommel. You can find Strommel’s posts here and here. (I highly recommend his blog, in general, as…
Continue readingIt’s a heavy time at our university. The pandemic is still with us (a funny/not-funny tweet I read recently said, “i didn’t realize 2020 was gonna be a trilogy”). Within the first few weeks of class, I had six students…
Continue readingThose of you with kids, or those of you who have simply been spending way too much time on your Netflix account since the pandemic began (no judgement!), may have heard of the movie called Yes Day, released in 2021…
Continue readingFor the last fifteen years or so, I’ve done freelance editing work as a side gig. This winter break, while moping around with a mysterious months-long lung infection (not COVID… probably?), I edited a colleague’s book manuscript, which focused, in…
Continue readingA few weeks ago, I had to put down my cat of 14 years. She was very sick and there were no roads to recovery. Her name was Regan. I got her my first year of graduate school, when I…
Continue readingAs we begin thinking about our fall courses (sorry!), we may again find ourselves facing unfamiliar teaching contexts; some of us may be teaching courses that are online or hybrid or “HyFlex” (*insert brain-exploding emoji here*) for the first time;…
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