Prurient interest alert!

I loved this tweet by Charlie Sykes: https://twitter.com/SykesCharlie/status/1639271018358362113 Oy. Now we're going after artworks? Have we also considered banning discussion of that other Renaissance painter, the one with the name no 7th grade boy can pronounce without giggling (aka Titian)? And what about the authors Dickens and Dickenson? Will AP Art History be cancelled because…

Adding some orienteering skills

When I was a child, my father taught me to read a map so I could help navigate on car trips (Mom drove, he would do work or nap while I followed the route). Then, in sixth grade, as part of the leadup to a weeklong class trip, we learned orienteering skills. I'm not sure…

The digital natives are lost

My parents moved to the the town I mostly grew up in in 1969. The next ten years I got driven from place to place and since getting my driver's license I've been both driven and driven others. Because it's been 50 years, several once familiar places have gone out of business or moved, but…

Naming the problem

If you know me, you know how much I hate (hate's actually too mild a phrase for my feelings) the misuse of the word "name". You know: when someone "just wants to name that this is difficult" or "let's name the issues". NO. No no no no no. You are not "naming" - you're identifying…

If I ruled Research Season

(written at the end of the first week of Research Season Part I at Milton, US History) On the one hand, I think it's important that our students learn to do academic research, leading up to a 10+ page paper (and by + I mean anywhere from 10-30 pages) that synthesizes sources from secondary to…

What’s missing?

I've been hearing this more and more from friends both at work and at other schools: students are missing [skill]. Sometimes that skill is something that used to be taught, but given the COVID changes, just slipped through the cracks as content was watered down due to hybrid or online teaching. Sometimes it's a "soft…

Minor Musings

Wow, it's been a while since I did one of these.  As we move into the Winter Break season, here are some links to enjoy/bookmark/get inspiration from. Books, Reading, etc. The Cybils are always a good RA tool, and now they have playlists!  What could be better to share with students? Yes, this is a…

Why a small school?

A few years ago I was interviewing at a well-known "SLAC" (Small Liberal Arts College) and was asked to do a presentation on why a liberal arts school. The position was for an instructional technology job, and one of the initiatives was to be able to have hybrid classes with students at other institutions. After…

I feel so old

https://twitter.com/adrisheares/status/1557885461154111490?s=11&t=C3_I1GsVaBsvx3wFpJLvYQ Wow. When I started research, my "search engine" was the card catalog, and sometimes (for deep searching) the <i>Reader's Guide</i>. Remember those? Good times. This isn't an attempt to paraphrase Sondheim, but I've been through CompuServe, AOL, AskJeeves, AltaVista, Infoseek (via Netscape Navigator)... and I'm still here. I currently use Duck Duck Go, but…

Inspirational grace

For a variety of reasons, it has taken a few days to post about a loss to our community: a colleague had a recurrence of cancer and decided to stop treatment and enter hospice. A short time later, he died. His last message to everyone read in part: That message resonated with so many of…