Popularity contest results

The other day I posted my ten favorite posts from the past three years. One thing I’ve been interested in during this time is how people end up here. The ten most-viewed posts from the past three years give some interesting insight into how that happens. There is also relatively little overlap with my ten [...]

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Three years summarized in ten posts

A lot has changed since my first post three years ago. Parts of the transition from ABD with a job offer to third-year assistant professor at a small liberal arts college have gone the way I expected while others have not. I’ve decided to celebrate the past three years with an early-career retrospective of my [...]

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Follow-up on community involvement

I’ve mentioned before that I was able to become involved in local government last summer. After being part of a local government subcommittee for the past six months, including biweekly meetings, I have a number of thoughts on the experience so far. In addition to my initial surprise at how quickly local government can move [...]

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The semester I’ve been waiting for

Two and a half years ago I faced an adjustment from teaching one or two courses per semester as a graduate student to teaching three courses per semester as a new assistant professor. My first semester taught me that I didn’t like preparing for MWF classes and that I didn’t have any time for research. [...]

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The middle of the end for textbooks

A few years ago when a larger, textbook-sized version of the Kindle was released I called it “the beginning of the end for textbooks.” While the Kindle DX still exists, it is not currently advertised as a part of the “Kindle Family” on the Amazon homepage. Bigger, it seems, is not necessarily more popular. Two [...]

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Dreaming of students

Although I’ve been teaching college students for years they’ve only recently started appearing in my dreams. First, there was the pre-ASA dream in which students were talking amongst themselves on the first day of class instead of listening attentively to the details of my exciting syllabus. Then, over winter break, I had two more dreams [...]

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Giving the Grad Skool Rulz

I recently purchased copies of Fabio’s Grad Skool Rulz for myself and some students who are planning to go to grad school next year (and yes, I paid for the “copies” that I gave to students). The question I always have about packaged collections of things that originated on the internet is whether it is [...]

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If at first you don’t succeed, change majors

In my two and a half years of teaching at a liberal arts school, I’ve talked to a number of students who were switching to a major in the sociology department. There are a few reasons for this, including the fact that a lot of students change majors after they actually experience college classes and [...]

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College town vs. town with a college

A recent trip to to an R1 for a college basketball game brought back a feeling I didn’t know I missed – the feeling of being in a college town. It turns out that there is a huge difference between a “college town” and a “town with a college.” I suppose that I would classify [...]

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A syllabus in stone

When starting out as a teacher I was often told that a syllabus is a sort of contract. (This doesn’t make a syllabus sound very exciting, but we can’t all be David Foster Wallace.) As I’ve prepared for classes over the years I’ve always kept this in mind. Although my syllabus notes that the class [...]

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