Category Archives: academe
Just a Marking Machine
The chapter draft is done. I’m pretty impressed with myself. It took less than a week to come up with a chapter of just over five thousand words, most of it dealing with historical parallels far afield of my early … Continue reading
Snow Day: A Professor’s Perspective
Woke up before dawn this morning and raced out of the bedroom to rouse my computer from sleep mode as I peered out the living room window to a discouraging scene. Winds roared from the south, racing up our street. … Continue reading
Return of the Term
It’s ba-ack! The term, that is. Run and hide in fear! Actually, this term isn’t half so bad as last term. Half the classes, pretty much, and nearly down by half the enrollments. One class is brand-spanking new: a seminar … Continue reading
Filed under academe, teaching, writing/editing
Grading Jail
It’s gotten to be that there’s so much end of term marking every December that I can no longer summon the energy to panic. I just mark as best I can, call it a day sometime around eleven at night … Continue reading
Droolworthy Digital Resources
Sharon Howard, at Early Modern Notes has alerted us to a new project in which she’s involved: Manuscripts Online: Written Culture from 1000 to 1500. Colour me excited! She describes it as a kind of Connected Histories for medievalists. That’s … Continue reading
Talking ‘Bout My Institution
Over at Historiann’s corral, there’s a great discussion underway, inspired by Tony Grafton’s review of a raft of books on the crisis in higher education. Historiann’s charged her regular commenters, including yours truly, to describe our institutions and what the … Continue reading
Breadth and the Curriculum
I killed a sacred cow today. At our department meeting, I convinced colleagues that it was time to abandon our breadth requirement for senior seminars for taking at least one in our two ‘streams’ of North American and European history. … Continue reading
Filed under academe
10,000 hours
While Malcolm Gladwell may be an annoying gadfly at times, in his assessment of the importance of practice in mastery, he’s dead on. Ten thousand hours, he explained in Outliers, is the amount of time believed needed to achieve true … Continue reading
Filed under academe, pop culture, writing/editing
Five Days a Week?
For the full-time academics out there, how many days a week do you teach? I know there are two schools of thought with the popular one hereabouts being to pile up all your teaching on two, three, maybe four days … Continue reading
Could Be Worse
Could be dead, or stabbed. Or it could be midweek! But it’s Friday and I’m whole and hearty. Bonus! Made it to the weekend and neither the meeting with the dean nor my burgeoning workload managed to bring me down. … Continue reading
Filed under academe, writing/editing
