- Bulbs and boxes

What I like about bulbs, which I planted on Sunday, is their utter forgetability. I dig a hole, drop them in, leave their spot unmarked, and forget. The cold and short days of winter will pass — some sparkling days swiftly, most days grindingly — and then one day I’ll be walking up to the [...]

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- Feedback season

When it’s midterms for students, it’s midterms for teachers. (There’s something rather binge-and-purge about school, isn’t there?) In the past two weeks, since Columbus Day, I’ve been reading, commenting on, and grading the drafts of technical reports and scientific analysis papers, about 35 altogether. They’re long (average: 20 pages), but after the first few in [...]

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- Presentation of self

Once in a while, if someone knows or notices that I wear an insulin pump, that person says to me, “Don’t you love it?”, gushing on the word love.
This happened to me recently, during my annual check-up. I was sitting on the table with a paper gown wrapped around me and talking to my doctor, [...]

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- The anonymous they

Today I heard students discussing feedback that their team had received from a few instructors on a presentation. The students’ sentences uniformly began with the pronoun “they.”
They liked [such and such].
They said [so and so].
They didn’t like [such and such].
After several of those sentences, the “they” became a blur, and, even though I had a [...]

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- The conversational arts may be suffering.

*
The conversational arts may be suffering…, but like it or not, we are all writers now.
– Anne Trubek, “We Are All Writers Now,” More Intelligent Life.

*Read Trubek’s piece — on the proliferation of writing –  here.

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- Explicit teaching

In the first few moments of her three-day workshop, Supporting Reading Comprehension, Writing, and Study Skills at the Landmark College Institute, Linda Hecker prompted participants (I was one of five) to introduce ourselves and say why we came.
When it was my turn, I answered that I wanted to learn and develop more explicit teaching methods, [...]

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- Uneasy nostalgia

I finished writing and revising “Dead and Gone,” and I sent the essay off to editors of a journal who asked to see more of my work. One editor e-mailed me back today, confirming its receipt. All I can do now is wait.
A few readers and friends have asked about the incident central to the [...]

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- Evidence

Last summer I started and made substantial progress on a draft of a memoir/essay about having a crush on one of my Wellesley College professors, *not* having an affair with him, and reading many years later of his death from prostate cancer. A first excerpt is here, and another one is here. (There’s also a [...]

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- Sunflower folly

This is what hope looks like.

During a spring semester clouded by the recession and my own economic downturn, I forced myself to take on tasks that were both optimistic and doable. I tended to my students and their work; I cultivated ties to colleagues and friends; I hoed the already neat rows of my resume; [...]

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- Accentuate the positive

This week at MIT could be called “Presentations Galore.” In many classrooms, lecture halls, and meeting spaces, day and night, students are making formal presentations to their peers, profs, and even parents, if they want to invite them. My colleagues and I who are communications lecturers have been overseeing a lot of the behind-the-scenes rehearsals [...]

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