I learned a few days ago that one of my high school teachers, Otis Benson Davis, died last week. O.B., as we all called him (only behind his back - -to his face he was, of course, Mr. Davis), graduated from Kent School in 1942 and returned to teach there full time in 1949. He retired from active teaching only a few years ago, in 2006. I graduated from Kent 36 years after O.B. did. He was my AP ...

--Joann Lipman notes in the New York Times that women's advances in the work force seem to have stalled since 9/11/2001, despite the fact that women make up half the work force, and "mothers are the major breadwinners in 40 percent of families." As one of those major breadwinners, I could wish that Lipman had followed through on her analysis of the reasons for women's lack of progress in the work ...

When we dropped Mariah off at college this fall we didn't really think we'd see her before Thanksgiving. The drive, for one thing, is punishing: 550 miles, most of it on I-95, and however much googlemaps says you can make it in 8.5 hours, we've never done it in less than ten. Ten and a half, really. My schedule's unusually busy this semester and a weekend away seemed an impossiblity. And, with ...

Dana Campbell came at the new census data on "opting out" last week from a rather different perspective than mine: the perspective of the opter-out, if you will, rather than the opter-in. And I agree with my fellow Mama, PhD that we need more subtle distinctions and more, not less, discussion of the work-family issues that make career "choice" increasingly a chimera. But I do also, generally, ...

I've been going to a lot more meetings this year than I've done in years past — it's a mark of my current position chairing our new First Year Seminar program. There are, it seems, endless meetings on the way to establishing a new academic program: I go from committee meeting to faculty meeting to student interview and back again, usually carrying not only the materials I need to consult in the ...

Once a week or so I leave my house in the morning at the usual time, bag packed, computer stowed—but instead of heading straight to my office I go elsewhere. Specifically, I head to a very public, chain bookstore café — one with free wifi — where I order a cup of coffee, plug in my laptop, and work for a few hours before heading in to my office. The place is hardly welcoming. It’s the ...

Updates from my daughter, now in her second week of college, come in the form of facebook status updates and text messages. We’ve talked a couple of times as well, but we’re certainly not having the daily phone conversations that some of my friends and colleagues have reported as the norm between college kids and their parents. This doesn’t really surprise me: we’re text people, in our ...

Many years ago, my husband and I planned our wedding for Labor Day weekend. Almost everyone we knew was a teacher, and school always started after Labor Day, so it seemed a convenient time as well as a date we’d have no trouble remembering.And then we moved, and I began teaching in a college with an academic year that runs from late August to early May, rather than September to June, as I’d ...

There's a crispness to the air today, a snap that makes me think fall is on the way. New England falls are glorious, and I'm sorry I won't see most of this one; we're only here for a few days, making what I've been calling a “royal progress” to take our daughter to college.When I realized she'd need to be here during my second week of classes, I briefly considered not coming. To get her to ...

I got back to the States just over a week ago. The next morning, my 12-year-old started a week-long day camp and I went back to work. Our last few days in England had been a true vacation, sightseeing in London, and I’m really glad we took the extra days. At the time, though, it had begun to feel almost like a burden—there was a syllabus to write, after all, a talk to give at the faculty ...