Opinion

In this post, Amy Rubens reflects on the new semester and “first day” rituals. As a section leader, instructor of record, or professor, how do you begin the first day of class, and why? This year, I’m the section leader and grader for an introductory American Studies course. Prior to this appointment, I’ve been an instructor of record for composition and literature courses for a number of years. In this post, I offer some reflections on my own first day rituals in smaller, discussion-based courses in the humanities that service a variety of majors.

It is college and university leaders, not Occupy protesters, who have politicized issues of free speech, writes P.J. Rey.

As a writer, I’m a little jealous of the folks who write business books. Most of them only need one idea to generate hundreds of pages. I have to generate five ideas a week just to blog!

On 12/27/11, between the hours of 9:00 p.m/ and 10:00 p.m., I spent $248.49 on books.

What happens when you tweet out what you want from the world, and it happens!

My first book was the result of years of graduate work and was born of my dissertation. It had gone through multiple iterations and critiques from my adviser and dissertation committee. In the end, I felt as though the whole project was out of my hands, and I was simply responding to the demands of others. Of course, that is the point — as a graduate student, you are being shaped to join the ranks of academics who speak the same (metaphoric) language and share similar expectations for academic work.

As the new year begins I feel mostly how arbitrary the turning of the year is. The new school year began in August (September for some of you, including both my kids); the western Christian liturgical year, as I noted recently, began in November, and the Lunar New Year won’t come around until later this month.

Some of the last minute news of 2011 -- namely MITx -- made making predictions for 2012 for higher ed and technology particularly interesting.