Last year was my first year as a visiting assistant professor, and I kept up this blog project all year, posting nearly every week. The idea behind the project: getting a Ph.D. from a big research university doesn’t necessarily prepare you for life as a faculty member at a small liberal arts college. I thought
In the final weeks of the semester, as I submitted grades, prepared my summer syllabus, and bore down on some book manuscript revisions, I let this blog project slip. But since my summer course presents some challenges that fit my theme (i.e., they’re things that I, like many others, didn’t experience in grad school but
Last week I posted about an assignment in my Romanticism class, part of which requires students to add to Wikipedia’s glossary of literary terms, a potentially useful but mostly empty list. Thanks to my students, the list is now significantly less empty than it was a few months ago. I’m generally pleased with the assignment.