We leave for a six-week stay in England next Monday. In between now and then I have to finish my annual review, write a book review, hold a workshop on a novel for YA librarians, convene a committee meeting, and pack. I think I have a couple of personal appointments in there as well — haircut? Dermatologist? I trust to my google calendar to pop up a reminder in enough time for me to get where I ...

It’s that time of year—lots of things winding down, a few more starting. It’s been a month since my school year ended, but Nick’s last day of school is tomorrow. He’s ready — and so are we all. The end of the school year has been taken up with tests, projects, and the occasional field trip, and it’s starting to feel as if they’re just marking time. So tomorrow is the last day, and ...

Did you hear the news? Over-parenting is over. So decree the arbiters of lifestyle trends — or, at least, Lisa Belkin, who has been writing about parenting in the New York Times for the better part of this decade. Salon.com’s Amy Benfer notes the irony in Belkin decreeing the end of a trend that, arguably, she had something to do with starting, or at least naming; it was Belkin who wrote the ...

Last week Inside Higher Ed reported on an intriguing paper by Dahlia K. Remler and Elda Pema, a professor of public affairs and economics, respectively, that began to try to analyze the reasons professors engage in research “at the expense of teaching time.” In the report, titled “The Mystery of Faculty Priorities,” Scott Jaschik listed some of Remler and Pema’s preliminary conclusions, ...

Last year at this time I was beginning to see the end of my sabbatical. My colleagues had wrapped up their courses, turned in their grades, and had started to join me in my unstructured life of research, writing, summer vacation planning, and the like. This year it all feels different. My grades are turned in — other than the odd incomplete that will trickle in over the next few weeks — and ...

It’s been just over a year since I started writing this blog. Last May I was just coming off sabbatical, and we had just made significant decisions about our children’s next steps. I spent the summer writing, traveling, and planning for the fall, while my daughter graduated from high school and made her first forays into political organizing and retail sales and my son enjoyed his last summer ...

In graduate school my friends and I occasionally amused ourselves by imagining what our dissertation topics said about us. Female violence? Prostitution and “fallenness”? Sibling incest? They may have been safely “literary” topics, but what did it say about us that we had spent so much time on these topics rather than, say, gardens?We didn’t pursue those questions too far, of course. ...

This week the MLA released the full version of its “Associate Professor” survey results. Data from this report has been trickling out since the convention in December, but the full report merited articles in both Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education on Monday. It makes for interesting reading, particularly for this female associate professor at a private independent ...

Lately I find myself wearing several hats. I’m chairing a committee to look into our first-year curriculum, for example, at the same time as I’m advising my daughter on her plans for her first year in college. The disjunction is stunning.For many years now I’ve taught off and on in our first year program. It’s a two-semester course with a common syllabus, taught by faculty from across the ...

I read aloud in my classes a lot. In children’s lit, I explain that I want my students to experience the text as the child audience often does — as an oral performance. In my Victorian literature classes, I remind my students that many Victorian novels were family read-alouds, and I read short passages frequently to force us all to slow down, to pay attention to the details of scene-setting ...