By Liana Silva-Ford - Chronicle Vitae. In May the Center for American Progress released a report on diversity in K-12 classrooms across the United States. According to the study, the racial and ethnic makeup of public schools just isn’t reflected in the teachers in front of those classrooms. Only one in five teachers is not white. See more...
By Alice Umber - Chronicle Vitae. I spent five years on the tenure track. Now I’m an adjunct, and the move has affected my teaching in ways I didn’t anticipate. I’m not the teacher I once was, largely thanks to the lack of support I receive as an adjunct. Sadly, my students suffer the loss. I was an excellent teacher on the tenure track, and my evaluations—both from students and colleagues—consistently said so. See more...
By Nicole Matos - Chronicle Vitae. I recently served a year-long stint as associate dean of my community college’s English department while surviving my five-year-old son’s obsession with superheroes. Given our hour-long commute, I had plenty of time to hear about good guys and bad guys, adamantium claws and power rings. Somewhere along the line, I began to think about my new administrative role in the same fantastical terms. Must fly (from meeting to meeting). Must scale (in an architect’s plan) tall buildings in a single bound. See more...
By Stacey Patton - Chronicle Vitae. In his much-discussed new book, the political historian Rick Perlstein describes The Invisible Bridge—how the fall of Richard Nixon paved the way for the rise of Ronald Reagan and modern conservatism in 1970s America. But for a number of historians and editors at scholarly presses, the book’s title has taken on an unexpected second meaning. See more...
By Paula Krebs - Chronicle Vitae. Working as an administrator gives you a much bigger sense of how a student's progress through a degree depends on a lot of folks beyond the faculty. And it depends on good communication between those folks and the faculty. But we don't often set up systems that make such communication comfortable, expected, or rewarding. See more...
By Gregory Semenza - Chronicle Vitae. One morning about a year ago, I nearly spit out my coffee upon reading the claim that “sitting is the new smoking.” In summarizing the gist of recent research on inactivity, the Runner’s World article wasn’t mincing words: “The more you sit, the poorer your health and the earlier you may die, no matter how fit you are.” I leapt out of my chair and began pacing the room, trying to rewind the damage I’d just done to myself. I’ve long been aware of the fact that an hour at my desk aggravates my back way more than an hour of lifting weights or playing with my kids, but I hadn’t known that my reading and writing were literally killing me. See more...
By David Gooblar - Chronicle Vitae. In my last piece, I discussed the idea of using a survey at the beginning of a course as a way to find out more about your students, their previous experience with the course topic, their strengths and weaknesses, and their expectations for the class. It’s an idea that I plucked from “team-based learning,” the systemic pedagogical approach popularized by Larry Michaelsen and others. See more...
By Rob Jenkins - Chronicle Vitae. Only once have I ever played the “I’m an English professor” card with any of my kids’ teachers. That was when my middle son, then a high-school sophomore, received an F on a writing assignment that was clearly no worse than a B. Up to that point, my son, a genuinely gifted writer, had made nothing but A’s in Language Arts. See more...
By Kelly J. Baker - Chronicle Vitae. I miss my commute into the university, the solace of driving in and out. The drive was my transition from home to work—30 minutes there and back, depending on traffic. The hum of the interstate comforted me. I puzzled through research problems as I drove. I planned projects as I walked from my parking lot to my office. See more...
Questions ...
The Guest Lecturing Starter Guide. Q (from rhetoricalphd): I am getting guest-lecture invitations based on a book I wrote, and this is new for me. I wonder if I should frame my speech entirely around the book or pick an interesting aspect of the book and talk to the student body from that aspect? Do the students just want to hear "my story"? I am unsure. See more...
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