Student chewing pencil at computer.

Teaching in the Time of Coronavirus, Part II

BY AARON BARLOW The emails can be overwhelming. Hundreds of them from well-meaning colleagues, campus IT departments, our chairs, deans, provosts… everyone who can is chipping in to help us make hurried conversions to online instruction. In a way, it’s wonderful to see this response (though a little frustrating: many of us were advocating planning…

And This Is Why I Teach

My stepfather is dying.  I hate even using the word “step” because in every sense of the word, he is my father.  And he will be gone soon.  He is in hospice now.  There is a hospital bed in my mother’s living room.  There will be no more emergency room last ditch efforts to save…

The Creepy Invasion of Cengage in My Email Inbox

July 3 and I am minding my own business, just checking email before Independence Day, and I have an email from someone named Ashley Minton, Ashley.Minton@cengage.com, with a cc: to someone named Rachael Pigg-Wisner (Wisner) at rachael.wisner@cengage.com. Yes, the sender’s email contains two caps, and the carbon-copied recipient’s email is all lower-case. The email subject…

"That’s Not What Happened to Me"

This is a guest post by Kevin Brown, a professor of English at Lee University. His article, “That’s Not What Happened to Me,” appears in the online version of the January-February 2014 issue of Academe. I do a fairly decent job of keeping up with higher education news, especially as it relates to my discipline.  Thus, I’ve been…

12 Angry Professors? (Not Quite)

How is a courtroom like a classroom? The two may not seem related – but as Patricia Evridge Hill writes in the new issue of Academe, they are more alike than you might think. While serving as the foreperson of a jury recently, Hill realized that the eleven other members of her group had a…