It’s that time of year again! The time when we all get to see how over-optimistic I was last January! Here we go with my goals for 2018: 1. How to better understand spoken German. Starting in March, I began listening to a learning German podcast every weekday: Slow German.…
Here are 10 things I learned in 2018. They are helpful in that they helped me; results not guaranteed for anyone else. 1. How to balance bullet journals and flexibility. I like keeping records. I like maintaining habits, planning out routines that help me achieve goals I want. However, because…
Hooray! It’s the end of the year! I’ve survived on caffeine and physical activity (and, okay, some help from my family, my spouse, my friends, and other people I love). I’m grateful and humbled to have so many Big Life Things squared away… … but I’m still gonna have a…
When I was in Hebrew school, our teachers warned us about the dangers of assimilation. I’ve almost forgotten how often they did this, mainly because even at the time, I didn’t take it seriously. Some of them talked about it like the mainstream white Anglo-Saxon Protestant society Borg were going…
One of the most difficult parts of creating assignments is writing the guidelines. No matter how clear I think they are, students will always bring to my attention some aspect that they find confusing. Sometimes, the confusion has to do with minor inconsistencies–fair enough, I should have proofread more thoroughly…
As university lecturers, my colleagues and I are sometimes called upon to make judgments on what’s fair. Should we let student A re-write the midterm? Is it right to excuse student B from class for a sporting event? If we had perfect information about the world, every call would be…
The Magician’s Nephew was retcon before retcon became a thing. I remember feeling… disappointed when I finally got this sixth Narnia volume from my Scholastic book order in third grade. Up until now, the timeline had been fairly linear. Sure, The Horse and His Boy threw everything on its head…
This summer was particularly great, and this back-to-school season was particularly rough (thanks, High Holidays + revamping lesson plans + new-to-me-course! Also normal political the-world-is-going-to-hell stuff that I’m sure everyone is happy not to be reminded of again here). But here are 9 things that made the greatness greater and…
I am really lucky: going to a major theatre production in a professional venue is a comfortable experience for me. I’ve had opportunities to go to big-name productions since I was a teenager. But plenty of people haven’t been to a live theatre production before. If you’re one of them,…
C’mon, now, don’t pretend you don’t know what it means to be a Perfect Writer. We’ve all read the six gazillion books… and articles… and listicles of 15 Tweets Only Real Writers Will Get… We know what Perfect Writers do and don’t do. So why is it so hard to…