What to say about this academic year?

What to say about this academic year?

What to say about this academic year? This was, for me, the hardest year, and this past spring term the most difficult of the pandemic. In many ways it should have been one of the easiest: I taught in a physical classroom, sharing space with my students—the modality in which I have taught the longest and am most comfortable. For most of the term, Covid numbers on campus and in my county were low, and everyone in my classes was…

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What Do Historians Do? (II)

What Do Historians Do? (II)

Have you ever asked your students exactly what historians do? I’m teaching my department’s historiography and research methods course this term, and ‘what do historians do?’ is one of my favorite questions.  No one ever asked me to think about this when I was an undergrad.  Historians were quasi-mythic creatures who lived Somewhere Else, Doing History Things, and Writing Lots of Books. I knew some of my professors were historians (I was an American Studies undergrad) but other than show…

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Teaching This Trimester

Teaching This Trimester

I’ve been pondering for days now how to sum up the experience of teaching his trimester. While messages speed toward us from all over higher ed about things being “back to normal” they’re anything but. Yet how do we quantify the shifting physical, emotional and mental landscape of our teaching life? What are the things we point to when we try to give definition to the shape our fatigue and unease? As best I can describe it, I feel displaced,…

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Looking Back to Look Forward

Looking Back to Look Forward

In April, 2021, after I was fully vaccinated and more than two weeks past my second shot, I had a friend come to visit for the weekend. She was my first guest since 2019, and I anticipated that after months of isolation the visit would feel strange—that I would find it hard to be around someone else for a prolonged period of time and I’d likely feel overwhelmed.  I was glad to discover the very opposite.  The weekend was tremendous…

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Reflecting on a Pandemic Year+

Reflecting on a Pandemic Year+

We’re coming to the end of an academic year spent wrestling with the pandemic, which followed a summer spent wrestling with the pandemic, which followed a spring semester spent wrestling with the pandemic.  Most of us are exhausted and burned out, and many of us feel demoralized. We have screwed up every ounce of energy we’ve had to make it to this end point, and now comes a dizzying array of emotions: relief, grief, the ability to breathe again, panic,…

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A Breath

A Breath

For many of us, this week marks the one-year anniversary of lockdown, and the shift to lifeboat learning for much (or all) of spring 2020.  In revisiting that moment in tweets, FB memories, and things that I wrote, I’m struck by how wholly unprepared I was for that challenge. I’m also struck by how late our places of work made the decision to go online, and how short an on-ramp many of us had to provide instruction in an entirely…

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A letter from the floor

A letter from the floor

My friends and I have a shorthand for being completely overwhelmed: we say we’re lying on the floor.  I’ve used this phrase dozens of times and have never actually being lying on the floor while sharing it, but it encapsulates something raw and essential about reaching my personal capacity for coping.  Sometimes it’s all I can do or imagine. All I want is to lie on the floor. Kate Braestrup, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Maine, once observed that when…

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Teaching Academic Integrity

Teaching Academic Integrity

When I last taught my college’s First-Year Preceptorial class (a class focused on intensive reading and writing, and lots of class discussion), I wanted to find a new way to teach about academic integrity. Teaching a citation method and drilling down to the placement of periods and commas didn’t feel productive—more, it felt like it focused on all the ways in which students might screw up. I had heard students confess to being scared of citation, of mucking things up…

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Ungrading in a Pandemic

Ungrading in a Pandemic

Back in the Before Times, I wrote a blog post about ungrading, and how it had made an enormous difference in the experience of grading for both my students and myself.  Grading went from being a chore to being a delight, and I thought I had found The Way (tip o’ the hat to The Mandalorian) from which I would only deviate if I could improve upon it. Ha! Enter the pandemic. Where once I had every student come into…

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Business As Usual

Business As Usual

I’ve been musing over the last few days about the way we’re (at least I’m!) trying to conduct business as usual. On Friday, I hit a wall. I woke to the news that the President had Covid-19, and there was no time to process or assimilate this information—to work out what it meant—before I needed to teach my first synchronous class session of the day.  This news chased on the heels of a hundred other pieces of news: Amy Coney…

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