Serendib Teaching

It’s funny — I had a long conversation yesterday with Jed about the difficulty of doing performance evaluations that accurately measure how people really do at their jobs. There’s a massive critique happening in academia regarding the racialized and gendered issues with student course evaluations, for example. There’s also the ‘bad review’ problem — as […]

I don’t mind teaching online occasionally, but for more than a year straight? Too much. I’m really exhausted; I handed in my final grades and kind of wanted to cry with the tiredness. I will take the commute, if it means I can see my students’ faces and hear their voices in person in the

Finishing up grading, down to the wire, per usual. I could go faster if I didn’t take the time to enjoy the sweet notes from students — who *really* appreciated a little extra flexibility this semester. Some of the notes make me laugh: “I wanted to say thank you for such an excellent semester. I

One class down for the semester, one to go. Per usual, I’m already missing my munchkins. When they’re stressing out about their final papers, they don’t realize how fond of them we are.

Today I shocked my students by telling them that marital rape was legal throughout America until 1975. “Marital rape in United States law, also known as spousal rape, is non-consensual sex in which the perpetrator is the victim’s spouse. It is a form of partner rape, of domestic violence, and of sexual abuse. Today, marital

We’re covering feminist theory in my intro to lit theory class today. I’ve taught an entire course on women & lit., so prep for this week was mostly distilling down 15 weeks of material to 1 week. No biggie. Argh. I did get to give them my ‘rage interview’ assignment, though. They read some theory,

I am amused by an assignment I came up with for my English theory class this week — in addition to their academic reading on postmodernism, I’m having them watch an episode of reality TV, and write a journal entry on how well it does or doesn’t represent reality. I’m also asking them to consider

“In Idaho, a public university abruptly cancelled dozens of diversity-related classes as lawmakers advanced a budget cutting funding, threatened further cuts, and added provisions barring Idaho universities from using state funding to support “social justice” activities, clubs, events, or organizations…. ….In addition to the $409,000 cut — which one lawmaker said “borders on censorship” —

Career update stuff, just in the interests of transparency; I’ve decided to wait a year for my attempt to go up for promotion to clinical full professor, mostly because while I have the Jump Space book under contract, it’s not due to be published until the fall (or early next year), and it’ll be a