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This year, I am giving a graduate I know the book, “I Moved Your Cheese: For those who refuse to live as mice in someone else’s maze,” by Deepak Malhotra at Harvard Business School. Published last year, it provides a Wall Street Journal best-selling answer to the question posed by the popular business book, “Who Moved My Cheese?”

This year, I made a fortunately successful run on the academic job market, and I'm looking forward to beginning my tenure-track position in August. Until now, I’ve resisted posting on those experiences. I have, however, commented on the job search more broadly. For instance, I’ve discussed the need for doctoral students to simultaneously prepare for the academic- and non-academic job markets. It seems odd to me, then, that I haven’t offered some hacky, this-is-how-you-do-it tidbits for writing the academic cover letter, preparing a writing sample, practicing for interviews, and acing the campus visit.

Admittedly, it's been a few years since I last read 1984 by George Orwell. However, the themes of widespread surveillance and "thoughtcrimes" are generally applicable to all sorts of present day issues. One of the curiosities that has emerged in the area of social media communications is the monitoring of student athlete accounts.

Imagine for a moment that you are the Educator Queen (or King) of the World. You have the power to make a Royal Decree about the education app that will be created next. Everything you survey is yours, and your will we be done. What are your orders?

If you haven’t seen Tom Bailey’s piece on the Connecticut remediation law, check it out. He’s the head of the Community College Research Center at Columbia, of which I’m a huge fan, and it’s his response to Connecticut’s proposed law to restrict remediation in community colleges to a single semester.

I’ve been struggling with writing this post. I’m “burying” it here rather than sharing it on my regular blog post. I’m publishing it in the early summer hoping for fewer readers and that if anyone I know on campus reads it, they’ll have forgotten it by August when school starts again. I am going to be going to conferences and other activities soon where I will be meeting a lot of people face-to-face for the first time, and I hope that this isn’t the only thing they remember, being perhaps the last thing they read by me, about me.

A few thoughts on the genre of graduation speeches, how our appreciation changes when we listen live, when we watch online, when we're 22 (or older or younger).

An important topic from Algebra is that of intersecting lines. Equations can be written representing lines on graph paper, and Algebra, especially Linear Algebra, helps find points that are contained on more than one line, where two or more lines intersect. I thought of this last weekend as I watched former students walk across a stage to receive their diplomas, and realized that their lives had intersected with mine. I know that my life is richer for having known them.