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Traffic Patterns

Traffic Patterns

Sunday, I am out for a walk with a friend and her dog (keeping appropriate social distance on the sidewalk). Nature here is all brown — bare tree branches, last year’s grass dull and matted in every yard, autumn’s leaves plastered wetly along curbs and in flowerbeds. The world sits in that monochrome state between winter and spring, when everything has melted but nothing is quickening. Limbo. As if seasons have been put on pause. And then, it starts to…

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On Sourdough

On Sourdough

Let’s talk about sourdough doughnuts for a minute. I don’t actually know the first thing about them. Or rather, I didn’t really think about them one way or the other, until yesterday–when a confluence of several delightful things suddenly made me realize that I should be thinking about them, had been remiss in not considering them, and in fact, ought to be doing more research about them post haste. Delightful thing 1 is that I have been given my very…

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Small Comforts

Small Comforts

Nearly fourteen years ago, in the middle of the night, my daughter was born in a rush. She is not a person who rushes to things, it turns out, but she has a mind full of curiosity and delight, and so although I know that the mechanics of childbirth would surely give other explanations for why she came so quickly, I prefer to think her rush of arrival is simply of a piece with her eagerness about the world around…

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the Dracula diaries experiment

the Dracula diaries experiment

As schools and universities all over the country are scrambling to try to figure out how to move to remote teaching and learning in a time of great uncertainty, I am trying to stay focused on how I will do this in the least complicated ways for my students. Pedagogically, that means figuring out the top priorities for what I hope they will get out of what remains of our semester and then working on a plan that allows for…

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Charles “Chuckles” Dickens on Facebook

Charles “Chuckles” Dickens on Facebook

Twenty-Five Things About Me; Being But an Incomplete List of the Idiosyncrasies that Together Form the Better Part of One Man’s Existence in the Present Age* by Charles Dickens Author of The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Hard Times, David Copperfield, &cetera, and Editor of Household Words 1. My life has been filled with the best of times. (The worst of times I choose not to mention.) 2. When I was a child, my father called me “Chuckles,” in…

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On lateness, good pedagogy, and accommodations

On lateness, good pedagogy, and accommodations

Here is one thing we need to say out loud as faculty: it is almost impossible NOT to miscalculate how long it will take to do any given task of research or thinking or writing. For this (and probably other) reason(s), academics are notoriously terrible at meeting deadlines. And we ought to allow our students to have some growing pains in this regard as well. In twenty years as a faculty member, I’ve tried every form of lateness policy I…

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Apologizing

Apologizing

We all know people who are masters of the fauxpology–the “I’m sorry you feel that way” version of apologizing. But I have recently been thinking a lot about what makes a really good apology. And in the process, I have come up with a short list of liberating skills that I am working on, all of which are connected to making the work load of being a department chair a little less emotionally daunting. First: apologizing genuinely, and with a…

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Do you know who your “Committee of No” is?

Do you know who your “Committee of No” is?

One of the most useful things I have figured out in my career is that I need help saying no. Looking around at academics, it seems pretty clear that we fall into roughly two categories: those who can’t say no and those who never say yes. How to be somewhere in the middle is turning out to be the great conundrum of my professional life. This is both a personal and a systemic issue. I am personally always inclined to…

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Department Administration & the Awful Reality of the Internet Mob

Department Administration & the Awful Reality of the Internet Mob

I wrote an email this past spring that no department chair should have to write, but that increasingly, I think anyone associated with academia needs to remember we must write. It was addressed to the head of campus communications, pointing that person to a new article in a large mainstream publication, which talked in some detail about an academic field in ways that could easily draw the attention of an internet mob–those virulent wielders of word torches who are organized…

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What if we could measure value in units besides dollars?

What if we could measure value in units besides dollars?

This week in talk to your friends in other disciplines, already: going for a long walk with an economist friend reminded me that revelations happen when you make the small tweak of talking to people who ask different questions of the world than you do. Mine: the vast majority (all?) of the cost/benefit analyses of humanities higher ed measure cost in minute detail and do nothing at all to measure benefits. This problem of not measuring benefits with the same…

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