Monday

Next Up!

Next up! is a regular feature on Sundays, showcasing HWC (and beyond) events in the coming week. Send notice of upcoming events that you want publicized to me (drichardson2@ccc.edu). Use the “Comments” section to provide updates, additions, and corrections!

Welcome to week 4. At the end of this week, the semester will be 25% done. Seems kind of quiet, event-wise, this semester. Is it or am I just not hearing about what is going on? Is anything happening for Black History Month? Groundhog day? CAST? Where is everybody?

Monday, 2/3: Business as usual as far as I know;

Tuesday, 2/4: Business as usual as far as I know;

Wednesday, 2/5: Business as usual as far as I know;

Thursday, 2/6: Business as usual as far as I know;

Friday, 2/7: Business as usual as far as I know;

Saturday, 2/8: Business as usual as far as I know;

Monday Music

I had my ipod on shuffle this weekend, while walking the dog, and this song came on. I have no idea where it came from and neither does anyone else in my house. A gift from the universe, I guess–a great song and new lingo…2 for 1!

 

Monday Music

Monday Music is a regular feature whose goal is to provide you with some music to get you fired up for another week of doing the yeoperson’s work of educating the citizenry. Requests welcome!

The time to rock has arrived. It is now time to rock. Commence rocking.

Monday Music

Oh, sure–Adele would be an easy (and worthy) choice after cleaning up on the Grammy Awards last night and blowing the windows out with her surgically repaired vocal cords, but I thought that was too obvious.

There was a lot to like, really–starting with Bonnie Raitt and Alicia Keys’ tribute to Etta James, or maybe a little Willie Nelson doing Coldplay to animation about modern farming, the Foo Fighters rocked and Dave Grohl gave the best acceptance speech of the night, and Taylor Swift did my favorite song of hers (playing the banjo!) and got a standing O. I’m sure someone liked the trainwreck that Nicki Minaj put together (though I can’t say who or why)–but even with all of that to choose from, after the opening, I was all set to open up this morning with some LL Cool J in honor of the masterful job he did with the delicate job of MC (please note, I did not call it a ‘comeback’), but that was before the performance of the night.

Jennifer Hudson was miraculous. I can’t believe she had the courage to sing that song and then to sing it like that…mercy.

South Side represents!

Monday Music

Monday Music is a regular feature whose goal is to provide you with some music to get you fired up for another week of doing the yeoperson’s work of educating the citizenry. Requests welcome!

Week 16 is here!

Let ’em show you what they learned!

Monday Music

Monday Music is a regular feature whose goal is to provide you with some music to get you fired up for another week of doing the yeoperson’s work of educating the citizenry. Requests welcome!

I forgot about this video until this morning for some reason–it’s a dramatization of one of my very favorite parts of one of my very favorite reading experiences of the year/decade, the Eschaton game from Infinite Jest, which you really have to have read (I think) to make any sense of the video and know how awesome that section of the book truly is. Still, it’s a decent song and, at this point, I feel like my classes are mostly calamities and it’s almost December, so there you go.

 

Monday Music

Monday Music is a regular feature whose goal is to provide you with some music to get you fired up for another week of doing the yeoperson’s work of educating the citizenry. Requests welcome!

Three weeks left and this one is a short one. Welcome to Week 14.

There’s going to be a lot of talk about “security” in the next few weeks. Hopefully, most of it will include the Memphis Horns.

Monday Music

Monday Music is a regular feature whose goal is to provide you with some music to get you fired up for another week of doing the yeoperson’s work of educating the citizenry. Requests welcome!

If I knew how to do it, I’d take the chorus and scream from this song and hook it up to my doorbell and have a speaker inside and one right over the door turned up to 11, so that when anyone pressed the doorbell button they’d hear Black Francis and Kim Deal sing “Your bones got a little machine” and the scream. That would be awesome. I’d never get tired of it.

Monday Music

Monday Music is a regular feature whose goal is to provide you with some music to get you fired up for another week of doing the yeoperson’s work of educating the citizenry. Requests welcome!

Love that kick drum. And the gorgeous harmonies. And the chorus. My goodness. Breathtaking. It doesn’t hurt that the lyrics make a near perfect match for a philosopher’s theme song. If my life were a tv show, I’d want this as the song for the show:

And they play the Metro on October 4th.

Monday Music

Monday Music is a regular feature whose goal is to provide you with some music to get you fired up for another week of doing the yeoperson’s work of educating the citizenry. Requests welcome!

Once more, and this time with feeling…welcome to the first day of classes of fall 2011:

“…Gotta find a way, a better way, better way…”

Monday Music

Monday Music is a regular feature whose goal is to provide you with some music to get you fired up for another week of doing the yeoperson’s work of educating the citizenry. Requests welcome!

Finals week always makes me “Jumpi”!

Feeling Any Burnout?

Spring semester is tough. I am always running on fumes by the end of it, and this year is no different.

Last week, I got an email from Carrie Nepstad with this video on Cabin Fever in it–she must have seen the empty look in my eyes/posts, and then I remembered this article from Inside Higher Ed:

The analysis, which is based on 12 peer-reviewed studies in the United States, Britain, Canada, South Africa, Spain, Turkey and the Netherlands, likens levels of burnout among those who teach in higher education to those of schoolteachers and health professionals.

The authors also attempt to pinpoint the key factors that push some academics into a state characterized by “the depletion of emotional reserves (emotional exhaustion), an increasingly cynical and negative approach towards others (depersonalization) and a growing feeling of work-related dissatisfaction.”

And then, again, there’s this from the same piece:

With students increasingly consumerist, it was important to “set the boundaries of respectful discourse on both sides.” But she added: “We academics have to toughen up.”

Monday Music

Monday Music is a regular feature whose goal is to provide you with some music to get you fired up for another week of doing the yeoperson’s work of educating the citizenry. Requests welcome!

Driving through Milwaukee yesterday, my thoughts fell upon what I always think about going through that town–Bratwurst, Laverne DeFazio, Beer, the BoDeans, Milwaukee County Stadium, Summerfest, and the best thing to come out of Milwaukee: The Violent Femmes. It’s not my absolute favorite Femmes song (nor favorite version of this song), but I think of this song often while grading…”This will go down on your permanent record!” It’s surprisingly good to thrash around to as well, should you be in the mood for a little thrashing this morning.