Fall semester began today. (You have to imagine the title of this post as it would be pronounced by Sean Connery.) Nothing major to report, other than today happened to be the day they replaced the windows in my office, meaning I spent some time sitting outside in triple-digit heat preparing for class and then eating my lunch. Nice to have new windows, though.
Now I’ll begin to think differently about what I say on here as the very real possibility arises that students will google me and find this blog. Well, I guess it’s no more real than it was in the spring, when I started blogging. However, my Google ranking has improved considerably since that time. To be honest, though, I’m not sure my in-class persona is that different from my blog persona, but I’m probably not the best person to ask about that.
Listening to the new Cat Power CD tonight, You Are Free. Very good stuff. You can download a (free and legal) mp3 of one of the tracks: “Maybe Not,” hosted on the Sonic Youth server as part of Thurston Moore’s Protest Records project.
Back to reading Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina.
It’s definitely an odd sensation to have people find your blog, especially people you only know professionally.
The professor has left their context
George wonders if the notion that his students will find and read his blog will influence his writing, and decides probably not. Agreed. It’s on the other end that there may be more impact. I still have skewed notions of…
I definitely find myself writing differently in my blog, knowing that many students (and colleagues) read it regularly. It doesn’t stop me from posting personal material, but it definitely changes the amount of that I post, and the way I present it.
professorial ethics and boundaries
Elouise and George have written a bit lately on the issue of students reading professorial blogs, and on professor/student relationships generally. Like Chuck (who commented on Elouise’s post), I find that I’m not entirely comfortable discu…
It came out at a party with colleagues that I had a blog, and while I didn’t tell anyone the address, some people have found it through google. Recently I mentioned something I had done a few days earlier and the person I was talking to said, “Oh, right, I read about that.” I’ve also gotten email from a student who mentioned, in passing, reading my blog, but the email wasn’t about the blog; it was just using information from the blog to talk about something else.
While unsettling, there’s something cool about this in that I think I often express myself better and less guardedly in this space than I do in meat space.
This is a small part of why I moved this site to a server completely separate from the university where I work. It is entirely possible (though I hope unlikely) that someone will be upset with something I write one day, and I’d rather not have to defend using university resourcese to have said it if it comes to that.
More importantly, I didn’t want to feel like I had to keep the assumed focus on my job. Moving hundreds of miles away from everyone that I knew (minus two companions, one furry, one not), I ran the risk of being swallowed whole by work in the absence of other contextualizing activities. So it’s nice to be on a server with friends from Maryland and Georgia. I don’t want to feel like my every expression of myself has to be guarded (or work-related), and this outlet has significantly improved the quality of my interior life by letting more of it out.
Ouch.
I’ve been away for a bit (as those of you reading this — and I quote — “US person’s boring memoirs about his travel trips” (ahem) already know), and since I’ve been back, I’ve been caught in the thick of semester start-up: first-year advising, gradin…
On-line Teaching Resources
George H. Williams has started to explore the idea of some sort of on-line mechanism to share teaching resources (a…