Archive for the ‘Academic life’ Category

Fall 2009 chicken

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

Taking a leaf from Havi’s Friday Chicken, this post will review the semester just past, but with a few additional headings. The Hard I never got around to writing all the blog posts documenting my semester, its ups and downs—which is one of the reasons I started the blog, so that it ...

The bones beneath the skin

Friday, September 4th, 2009

A few months ago, I was struck by this tweet from HiroBoga. For whatever reason, a circuit snapped in my head and I Got It. All my little productivity obsessions and systems were all about creating my own infrastructure: my calendar, my to-do list, my inbox, my habits, all of it. ...

Downstream, Upstream

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

One of the ways to make sure a change in your life sticks is to make what you want to do so easy to do, you can't avoid it. Another way is to adjust your environment so that going back to the old way is more difficult. Not given to easy ...

My future is assured

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

Vaynerchuk tells anecdotes, but his main activities veer more into the uncool profession of teaching. In the above-linked interview he admits to being a "class clown," and I have found in my twenty years of teaching that that one characteristic is a better predictor of who ends up a teacher ...

Writing the Lit Review for Research Methods

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

Image via Wikipedia I recently finished a pretty big, for me, literature review that totaled about 17 pages, including the title page and two pages of references. Here are some scattered thoughts and lessons learned, at my customarily hideous length: I saw the wisdom of The Scholarly Cassidy's advice ...