I keep a folder titled "Student Praise" in which I save emails from students praising their experience in my class. This might seem like an obvious thing to do for "demonstrating teaching excellence," but I only just started doing it a couple years ago. I figured if no one has ever told me I should … Continue reading Teaching Tip Tuesday: Save the Praise
What You REALLY Need to Be Productive
(Nerd Alert!) I happen to love academic productivity advice, but a lot of it is CRAP-tastic for early career academics. At best it glosses over the real systemic issues facing EC academics; at worst it is insulting. I personally find it oddly comforting to listen to podcasts about paper planners and read posts about finding … Continue reading What You REALLY Need to Be Productive
Teaching Tip Tuesday: What Students Say is the Most Useful Thing They Learned for Research Writing
This post is a little bit for my fellow composition instructors, but also relevant for anyone who assigns research projects. A few years ago, I was looking for advice on how to better organize research for a specific writing project. I had already developed a handy way to capture research for future, unspecified uses (more … Continue reading Teaching Tip Tuesday: What Students Say is the Most Useful Thing They Learned for Research Writing
Congrats! You Do a Sh*t Ton of Stuff: Monthly Review
One of my favorite habits I've adopted this past year is doing a monthly review at the end of every month. Most paper planners have a dedicated page for this, but I like the one developed by Jo VanEvery in her newsletter (you should subscribe!) which is customized somewhat for academics. The reason I like … Continue reading Congrats! You Do a Sh*t Ton of Stuff: Monthly Review
Teaching Tip Tuesday
I've decided to start a new short post series here to focus on teaching tips every Tuesday. I mentor quite a few graduate student teachers, and their brilliant questions always make me realize I've amassed a good number of teaching tips over the past decade. These tips are based on my experience teaching in higher … Continue reading Teaching Tip Tuesday
Making Your Career 90% Awesome
Recently I was listening to this podcast by Cathy Mazak about designing your academic career to be 90% awesome. I found myself nodding along as she described how she wasn't willing to just muddle through an academic job that wasn't, for the most part, satisfying. I didn't realize this has been my M. O. since … Continue reading Making Your Career 90% Awesome
Is Your Teaching Energy Jar Filled with Sand or Rocks?
The other day a student privately messaged me on Zoom and said "You look tired. Thanks so much for all that you do for this course. It must be difficult." If you're a teacher you might balk at the observation about my looks, but to be fair to the student, I did look tired! My … Continue reading Is Your Teaching Energy Jar Filled with Sand or Rocks?
10 Tips for Virtual, Synchronous Participation
I was actually going to write about a different topic this week, but in a recent meeting a colleague mentioned how fatigued she was because her virtual synchronous sessions were basically all black boxes with the same four students participating each time. This particular colleague is up for a pretty rad teaching award this year, … Continue reading 10 Tips for Virtual, Synchronous Participation
NeMLA Roundup: All Things Digital
I attended my first large virtual conference recently at Northeast MLA where I chaired a panel and presented a paper. Even though I didn't get to attend all the sessions and meetups that I had ambitiously added to my conference agenda, I was able to make it to a good number of excellent panels. The … Continue reading NeMLA Roundup: All Things Digital
A “Less is More” Feedback Model for Online Writing Intensive Classes
Last semester I was asked to help facilitate a short workshop on strategies for providing feedback on low-stakes work in online writing-intensive (WIT) classes. It seems the pivot to online instruction has left faculty overwhelmed with the amount of written feedback they think is necessary in an online class. I should mention that *most* of … Continue reading A “Less is More” Feedback Model for Online Writing Intensive Classes
