Serendib Teaching

In my post-colonial lit. class, I assign one of my own stories among the other readings in the first week, mostly so they can get to know me a little better, but it’s also pretty relevant to the course material and helps set them up for what’s to come. It’s always sort of interesting when

Most of my students are keeping up really well with the asynchronous teaching, but I have 4 students who participated the first 2 weeks but then stopped turning things in. I sent them queries last week, no response. I sent much firmer queries today, in the vein of: ‘You are failing right now, please let

I’m hitting a point where I just don’t want to work anymore. Grading, in particular, is more awful than it ever was, and it was never good. I think it’s 6+ months of pandemic, aggravated by going back to teaching but not getting to be in the classroom. The work of teaching tilts much more

Very sad, and I’m really feeling for the parents who have sent their kids back, and are worrying even more now. This kid had a hidden disease that was triggered by catching Covid — none of us can know if our kids might have a similarly rare hidden condition. [Editing to note — I misunderstood

For anyone teaching post-colonial lit., Gastropod has two recent podcast episodes (both 45 minutes, I think) that I’d recommend, which you might want to share with your students (would be appropriate for high school as well as college, probably younger too): “Moo-Dunnit: How Beef Replaced Bison on the American Plains — and Plate” (9/15/20) “This

Yay! A student actually stopped by Zoom office hours voluntarily to talk about her paper outline. I’m holding a lot of office hours, in part because it’s relatively easy to do so via Zoom — I mostly just keep the window open and continue working on my own stuff. I have class time and early

Six weeks into the semester, and making videos is a little less nerve-wracking? Maybe? Here’s one that might interest some of you — I sing “Kilkelly, Ireland” for my class, stopping every few lines to try to connect the lyrics to what we’re reading about in terms of Irish history and colonialism. I am not

It’s really interesting getting little glimpses into Anand’s schooling. He just took his headphones off to complain to me that he’s supposed to listen to a 10-second clip of Hispanic music, and then write how it made him feel, and how it connects to Hispanic culture and history. “We haven’t even had a history class

It’s funny how anxiety-provoking it is, making teaching videos. I can walk into a class and talk to anyone. I can be on panels and talk to a thousand people. Being on TV is scary, but that’s understandable — it’s a potentially huge audience. But it keeps surprising me, how unnerving it is making a