“The Factory Girl” Just Teach One Project

There’s a really great project for teachers of Early American Literature. It’s called Just Teach One, and the goal of it is to get instructors to put one archive recovery text on their syllabus each semester. After teaching it, the instructors blog about their experiences with the text, offering suggestions for discussion, other texts to…

Six Word Memoir

I was talking to a friend about a week ago about the mock lesson she was teaching for a job interview. She told me that she was working on Six Word Memoirs with the class. I thought it sounded great, and since I’d been tapped to teach mock classes for the new student orientation, I…

Work Failure

This week has been not very productive. Yet teaching has gone really well, with students responding to the reading with lively discussion involving students that never ever speak otherwise. I wrote one and a half encyclopedia entries. Read a book. But there’s been a lot of upheaval in schedules, etc. which caused work to move…

Phoning it in

Dear Students, I’m sorry for sneezing all over you last night. I’m coming down with (or just a victim of ongoing) a sinus infection or some such. Seamus is a little snorfully too. I’m also sorry for googling “teaching Bartleby” in search of discussion questions for last night’s reading. Luckily someone had thought of this…

Feminist Mothering

After the class discussion on Thursday, one of my students asked, “Why isn’t there a class on these issues? We talk about it in some classes, but never for more than thirty minutes.” I told her I’d look into it, but we don’t have a class on the books for it. So, I’m thinking of…

Long Night’s Journey into Day

So last night sucked. In many ways. But was also awesome in some ways. Ain’t it the way it goes? But the night…Seamus is usually a good sleeper, but the last few weeks have been getting progressively worse with the wake-ups. So when he woke up at 3:45 and played in his crib until 4:50…