Like most of us, I’m stretched across a range of priorities and spaces, roles and allegiances. The struggle is really to be a teacher and a parent, a researcher and a radical socialist, a partner and a poet, a naturalist and a recovering hoodrat, all while keeping my liver and gallbladder from rebelling against me.
My CV is here, but how many of those priorities show up on it? Learning to round that out is life though, right?
This is a reposting of an article I wrote for The Michigan Daily in Sept 2022. ________ As someone who teaches classes for brand-new incoming students, the fall is an exciting time. I get to watch all these beautiful humans exploding into new things. There’s so much potential. As a first-generation student myself, I often… Continue reading Inflation and student loan rates are creating unsustainable debt
This semester, I’m teaching a mid-level academic writing course and I started out with a definition piece asking students to make an argument about a word. Common stuff, but a fun way to start a class. One student wrote about the historical moment where pretty started to be used as a diminutive kind of intensifier (“You’re… Continue reading Pretty Vague Comments on Writing?
In the 6 minutes or so I was in the car this morning, listening to NPR, I caught the tail end of an advertisement for MMR vaccines and a full ad for 3D mammography. Both were only thinly disguised as news pieces. So I’m thinking about NPR and their relationship to the broader medical-industrial machine.… Continue reading Sales Pitch Medical News
At Cs this year, I was fortunate enough to be on a panel with the amazing Norma Denae Dibrell, Sumyat Thu, and Sara P. Alvarez. In my talk, I highlighted Emil, an old student and one of the participants in my longitudinal study of Spanish-English students moving from high school through college. In short, Emil… Continue reading Performing White Monolingual Arguments
A good old friend and I hit a bit of a mudpit this weekend and I’ve been sitting soaking in it for a few days. He sent me a link to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?”and wanted to talk about it. The article had been circulating in the clinic at Pacific College,… Continue reading Malcolm Gladwell the Empiricist Mansplainer
My pedagogical approach emphasizes literacy as a matter of decoding and access, focusing on identifying what constitutes successful writing in a given context, and how those views of writing are connected to, different from, and sometimes in conflict with other ways of writing that students might have experienced. Throughout class, I help students learn the… Continue reading Teaching Philosophy
Learning to be calm about it 