personal
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Small Wins
Today I finished reading my first book in Japanese. “Reading” and “book” are both perhaps exaggerations; the book in question is the first volume in a manga series called Shirokuma Café, widely recommended to beginning Japanese learners. It is 165 pages long, and it took me 7 months of painstakingly reading a page per day Continue reading
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A Japanese Study Routine
YouTube is full of videos with titles like “How I Became Fluent in Japanese in 4 Days!” or “My Journey to Knowing 10,000 Kanji Even Though Japanese People Ask Me Why I Bother,” or even just “Study Japanese Like I Do and Soon You’ll Be Really Jouzu [good at it]”. I watch these videos occasionally. Continue reading
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How Do I Get Out of the Way?
I was standing in front of my classroom yesterday and I had a professional existential crisis. My students had walked into their first exam of the semester in various states of tension, resignation and hope, and a couple of them seemed uncomfortable to the point of rudeness – sticking their legs out into the aisle and Continue reading
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The Advantage of a Mean Neighbour
Today, anticipating the beginning of my winter semester and wondering if I have anything to say about it, I opened my “Drafts” folder and found this post, written in August but never published. At the time, the experience was too raw, and I didn’t want to dwell on it. Now, looking back, I see that my thinking around this Continue reading
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Ten Chapters In: Thoughts on Online Serial Novel Writing
What are you going to do with your long weekend? Maybe you’d like to read the first ten short chapters of a serialized novel about a twelve-year-old girl who suspects something funny is going on in her small town of Gale Harbour, Newfoundland. If so, you will find this novel, Nellie and the Coven of Continue reading
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Triumph Over Burnout: Blogiversary Post #4
At the beginning of the new school year, some of us feel refreshed and eager; others, not so much. If you’re filled with dread at the thought of vacation’s end (not the ordinary oh-I-wish-I-could-read-novels-on-the-deck-forever dread, but the more acute why-am-I-doing-this-with-my-life dread), then maybe it’s time to re-evaluate: is teaching really what you want to do? For Continue reading
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Blog Hop!
Apparently a “blog hop” is a thing. I’ve been invited to participate in this one by my friend Anita Lahey, whose fascinating blog Henrietta & Me is all about the books she’s reading and the people in them. Anita is a poet, essayist and journalist; her poetry collection Out to Dry in Cape Breton was Continue reading
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“I AM the Teacher”
After a long and infuriating day of grading final papers, here’s a random quote from my favourite writer that makes me feel oddly, ambivalently better. ‘You act,’ said one of her Senior Seminar students at a scheduled conference, ‘like your opinion is worth more than everybody else’s in the class.’ Zoe’s eyes widened. ‘I AM Continue reading
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The Art of Running Away
It’s been a tough semester. I’ve described some of the trials already: a new course that didn’t work very well, an unsuccessful experiment with blogs, a number of unpleasant end-of-semester exchanges. More than a month after the end of classes, I’m still dealing with a challenge to one of my plagiarism rulings, and still awaiting Continue reading
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When the Syllabus Goes Wrong
I cannot tell a lie. My new course is a failure. This semester, I did a complete overhaul on the English course I teach for Child Studies majors. The earlier version of the course was a solid one. It focused on the topic of childhood relationships in literature: parent-child relationships, sibling relationships, and friendships. We Continue reading
About Me
My job is to teach people to read and write; aside from that, I like to learn things.
Classroom as Microcosm 