Blogs

The first of an ongoing series highlighting everyday, ordinary adjunct heroes.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to think about my relationship to technology in a very focused way: what is it for? Which applications enable my work, and which get in the way? Why do I check e-mail so often, anyway?

I'm about to write a 900 word blog post about guilt, and I feel guilty about it. Why? Because I could be spending this time working on my dissertation. In fact, this is how I feel about most things that aren't my dissertation. I feel guilty when I'm hanging out with my friends, out to dinner with my fiancé, doing laundry, watching March Madness, or reading...*gasp*…a book for fun. It's not a particularly healthy way to go through life, and it places a great deal of stress on every moment of the day, since even when I'm trying to relax, I know I could be working.

So the interwebs were abuzz this weekend with discussions of an editorial in the Washington Post arguing that professors are vastly overpaid relative to their work, and that their relative laziness is a primary driver of the higher ed cost spiral.

In higher education, there are demand drivers for different degrees and credentials and institutions can choose to respond accordingly. One thing is certain - even a new degree or school created based on the most careful, accurate mapping of external trends with internal capabilities may fall short if the timing is off.

Things do seem to be coming together. I've got well over a hundred students, from around the world, and more and more names, each day, appear in my inbox (when a person enrolls, I get an email). Yesterday I recorded my third lecture, Distinguishing Between Good and Bad Poetry. (You can enroll in the series - it's free - by going here and scrolling down to Poetry.)

Call it dual enrollment, call it early college. I call it an opportunity to show high school how it can be done differently.

My husband and I celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary this past January; we have been together another two years. In the early days of our dating, my husband was game enough to seek out the odd and strange things that surrounded us in central Missouri. We have seen the beginning of the Santa Fe Trail, the largest salt lick in the Western Hemisphere, the world’s largest concrete goose, one of the purported world’s largest pecans, the room where Jesse James was shot and killed, and a “castle” in the Ozarks called Ha Ha Tonka.