Mama PhD

It seems that women like me set a bad example for our daughters when we make decisions that sacrifice career pursuits for family balance. I’m still reeling over a CBC radio piece

I was in a late afternoon meeting last Friday with a group of the kind of folks who are likely to be in a late afternoon meeting on a Friday. I think we had a dean and three department chairs there as well as at least two program coordinators—folks, in other words, who do a good bit of service, or who have put in so much time doing service in the past that they are now doing it full-time as administrators. Everyone was breathing that kind of sigh...

My friend Beth Adubato was raped in 1981 in her dorm room at the College of William and Mary after...

One of the things I like most about math and teaching math is that there are often several different ways to get to an answer. For example, if one wanted to differentiate the square of a binomial function, one could multiply (FOIL) it out and then take the derivative, or one could use the product rule or even the chain rule. I often show students how the same answer can be arrived at in multiple ways, filling the board with several different calculations that miraculously all give the same value in the end. It is then that I am tempted to write the letters “Q.E.D.” on the board, which, as we used to joke in graduate school, is Latin for “ta da!”

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to be part of a panel on “performing motherhood” with other mama PhDs at the OCSLG Conference at Loyola University Chicago. Elizabeth Coffman and I discussed our writing for this blog, while Shannon LC Cate and CL Cole discussed Shannon’s writing about their family in her own blog and at BlogHer.com and Babble.com. Although all four of us are mothers with doctorates, these twin threads of our identities as mothers, writers, and academics pull at us in different ways.

Last August, while selling cookies and lemonade at a stand she set up with a friend, my 12-year-old daughter met...

This was supposed to be a post about service. I was struck that last week’s post didn’t receive many comments...

Last week, our family traveled to Belgium for a brief vacation. We hadn't seen much of Ben for the previous...