Not enough weekends

I was chatting with one of our visiting professors at a campus dinner earlier this week, whose broad research area overlaps with mine and who taught our Computer Networks elective this year (an elective I usually teach). We commiserated over the difficulty of teaching Networks in a 10-week term, something I still struggle with after …

Not burned out

We're almost at the halfway point of Spring Term -- Midterm "Break" is this coming Monday -- and I can honestly say something that I rarely get to say at this point in the academic year: I am NOT burned out! I've probably more than beaten this point into the ground over my years of …

Mind the gap

I've been dreading this moment since I started the term. Last week, I sat down to prep my Thursday class and to outline the class meetings for the following week (this week). I opened the folder with my class notes, to see what I'd done at this point in the course the last time I …

Planning my summer athletic adventures

Now that the larger pieces of the summer schedule (kids' camps / work / travel, vacation, dates my summer research students are working) are in place, I've started thinking about my summer sports life -- what I want my summer athletic adventures to be. Back in December, when I was setting my goals for the …

How I use a weekly grid in my courses

Anne recently commented on my checklist for the start of the term post, asking if I could share more about what my weekly grid looks like. This is when I learned that I can't include my own images in blog comments. 🙂 So, I decided to write a longer post about what my grid looks …

Initial thoughts on the Tuesday/Thursday schedule

I am a whopping one class in to Spring Term, my first foray into teaching a non-capstone class on the Tuesday/Thursday schedule. My first class went pretty well, I think. I am definitely rusty on the content -- which makes sense, given that the last and only time I taught this class was Spring 2015. …

My start-of-term checklist

As a self-proclaimed productivity nerd, I am a huge fan of the humble checklist. (I'm actually kind of shocked, going through my blog archives, that I haven't blogged more about my love of checklists.) I set up my to-do lists (physical and virtual) as checklists, and love the act of checking something off once it's …

Things that only appear on my to-do list when I’m supposed to be grading finals

(with internal monologue in italics.) Keeping my publications list up to date is annoying. I mean, yes, I'm in a severe publication drought so it's not like this is actually a time-consuming task, but maybe someday it will be! Maybe I should write a script to auto-add the N most recent publications to my home …

Structuring a spring break

Our spring break starts a week from today. Depending on when we start Winter Term, spring break lasts anywhere from 10-14 days. Which seems like a luxury, until you realize that spring break is also our break between Winter Term and Spring Term. So, technically a break, but functionally less so. I have learned over …

Restarting a reading habit

Image credit: Hh1718, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons I am, and always have been, a voracious reader. According to family lore, I started reading (and memorizing) my aunts' and uncles' license plates around the age of 2 and a half. Many of my happiest childhood memories were of walking by myself to and from …