Have you ever before heard faculty talk so much about emotions?

Cathy Davidson, author of The New Education, asserted on the HASTAC blog that “our summer of planning for better online learning this Fall will be wasted if we do not begin from the premise that our students are learning from a place of dislocation, anxiety, and trauma. So are we.”

“Precarity, uncertainty, grief and feeling overwhelmed abound,” observed Becca Pope-Ruark in Inside Higher Education. She cautioned faculty to pay attention to signs of debilitating burnout.

Review: Flower Darby with James M. Lang, Small Teaching Online (Jossey-Bass, 2019)

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve been desperate to read advice on how to teach well online. Since we may well be teaching remotely again sooner or later, I decided to read and review Flower Darby’s Small Teaching Online.

Bottom line: Yes, I think it’s well worth a read.……..

But before you read:  Clear your mind. Give yourself a treat for having survived the spring. Take a vacation.

I’ll be blogging here periodically. The posts might be related to great instructional practices, specific dilemmas faced by me or my colleagues, useful resources, or interesting discussions in history, teaching, or higher education. I see this as an opportunity to think through some ideas and to do so while writing in a less formal way than I usually do.