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 ten favorite posts from this time period. When selecting them I was happy to see that they were distributed fairly evenly so that I didn’t end up with a Pearl Jam Twenty situation in which most of the attention is focused on the first 25% of the overall time period. The fact that it was hard to narrow the selection down to ten posts probably speaks more to my self importance than the quality of my posts, but without that self importance I probably would have never started a blog!

My ten favorite posts, in chronological order:

• Floundering on fellowship
• If this is a marathon, stop telling me to sprint
• PowerPoint, podcasts, and ending the illusion of student reading
• I’ve never heard of that
• How often do you brush your teeth?
• The publication current
• The art of class discussion
• Sociology and the “real world”
• Inequality as a room on fire
• The near impossibility of befriending students