I just received this e-mailer from Alibris about "armchair adventures."

With summer right around the corner, start planning your next great adventure with the captivating travelogues, guidebooks, and wanderer tales on our shelves. Here are just a few of our favorites-perfect for road warriors and armchair adventurers alike!

I was having a ( Read more... )

OmgI've been reading for work, reading for pleasure, grading papers, and sewing. I've been reevaluating resisting "real" work--the kind that makes me get up at 7:00 and come home at 5:30. I've been reevaluating resisting academia (and my dissertation for that matter). Taking stock ( Read more... )

Today I was supposed to be observed. I hate being observed. I hate the idea of someone coming in my classroom and mucking things up with a foreign presence. And then there's always the issue of observation for me. It makes me nervous to know someone's evaluating me based on rules I'm not familiar with. I get paranoid: "What if this school isn' ( Read more... )

Today has been pretty great so far. I taught two classes. No problems there. Good text. Some students in my 9:00 actually talked (Hell froze over, apparently). I drove home without incident. The garbage men had turned over all of my trash cans in an unprecedented display of proper can-placement etiquette. Dogs were happy and playful. ( Read more... )

I teach at 9:00 in a fancy, technology-filled room. I am sitting in it right now, in fact. But about three minutes ago a young-ish guy--younger than me--opened the door and looked at me pointedly: "Are you a faculty member ( Read more... )

Today I met with a student whose family recently moved to the United States from Iraq. This student instantly intrigued me on the first day of class but I tried to quell my interest for fear of freaking her out. Yet today we met during my office hour and she told me a bit of her story. Last year she and her sisters, mother, and father, came to ( Read more... )

Last week when I was driving to campus to teach I saw something miserable. I saw this boy--middle school age, I think, although I am notoriously horrible at gauging ages of children--standing at the corner of a residential street in my neighborhood, presumably waiting for the school bus to arrive. It was approximately 8:30 on a lovely, sunny, and ( Read more... )

People are going a little nutty, here. The morning news noted that 67 percent of Jacksonville residents are Gator fans (where that statistic comes from, I don't know), and the news anchor promptly quipped, "Which means there will be lots of revelry in the streets this evening!" Immediately I thought of siyeh and begrid cheering on the Bucks and I felt ( Read more... )