Cross-posted from Luther’s “Ideas and Creations” community blog. Main 218 is my favorite classroom for several reasons: like my campus office and my dining room at home, it has red walls. I’ve added some National Poetry Month posters to the walls over time, so the décor feels a little personalized. But most of all, it’s […]
Read moreWednesday, November 9, 2016: 7:30 a.m. I have a lot of thoughts but for now, as a college professor, will confine myself to this: What happens now to education, in a country where everyone claims to value it but our new president-elect, and those who voted for him, have just rejected its actual results? I’m […]
Read moreReading Craig Lambert’s new book Shadow Work for research on my own manuscript, my thoughts went immediately to faculty, at my college and elsewhere. “We are living in the most prosperous era in human history,” Lambert writes, “and prosperity supposedly brings leisure. Yet, quietly, subtly, even furtively, new tasks have infiltrated our days, nibbling off […]
Read moreThe recent controversies about “free-range parenting” have me thinking about something every college professor deals with: the relationship between parents and their college-age children, which is often very different from what we experienced with our own parents when we left home. Recently a prospective student’s parents asked me, “So, everything you are saying about self-motivation […]
Read moreIt’s that time again: the latest round of the anti-weed, lawn-spraying wars. In our town, this plays out not only in individual lawns but on the campus of our college, which routinely comes under fire from lots in the community and some on the faculty for its annual spraying (usually around Memorial Day.) I am […]
Read moreSitting in my backyard on the first warm day of the year, I’m reading my first-year college students’ last papers: personal reflections on Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” and its application to education as they want to continue to experience it. Emphasis on experience. One after another, they return to Plato’s central image: a […]
Read moreOn an ordinary November afternoon I sit on a chair in my eye doctor’s dim exam room, chin in the camera-machine, straining not to blink against the stinging dilation drops leaking through my lashes. A white flash jolts straight to the back of my head. And then, there on the screen are photographs of my […]
Read moreI wrote this for another “official” college blog but want to share it here. Darwin’s beetle: On geeking out October 23, 2013 Our first-year common course doesn’t fit into neat disciplinary boxes, and that’s the point. Ranging across literature, history, philosophy and science, it’s not designed to convey “expertise” in any one field but to […]
Read moreSeptember 30, 2013 An Open Letter to Our College President on the Digitization of Learning From The Cheapskate Intellectual Dear President, Thank you for being a thoughtful leader and serious colleague who has invited us to wrestle with the challenges and opportunities facing us and all other colleges these days. At your State of the […]
Read moreNine o’clock after my evening writing class in the community arts center and I’m coasting on my bike through the river bottoms, on my way home. Not a sound but tire-slurp in mud, animals, birds. Mist rises from the water. A rustle in the grass becomes a garter snake, a long stripe with a darker […]
Read more