Archive for work-life
Summer teaching
This weekend I will be fine-tuning teaching notes for next week’s classes.
At Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the summer term is starting. I’m teaching third-year courses: Technical Report Writing and Advanced Professional Communications. I’ve made a couple small changes in the curriculum to streamline my students’ efforts (I hope). This will be the first semester since spring 2020 I’ll be meeting students face-to-face in a classroom. I doubt my mask will conceal my real excitement. I am truly thrilled.
On Monday I will be visiting, via Skype, a classroom at Brooklyn College. The class: “Parapsychology: A Critical Examination” (PSYC 3585). I’ve been an invited guest to this class since 2017. I discuss what it was like to be part of organizations that promoted skeptical interpretations of paranormal and psychic phenomena back in the 1980s and 1990s. The students and I always have really wonderful back-and-forth discussions.
I am blessed to have my gig.
It’s now Lucy Sante
Such a terrific writer. I’ve followed her work for decades, beginning with her New York Review of Books pieces. She has a fine website.
“righteous certainty”
I’m a big fan of Atrios and his blog, Eschaton. Here’s a worthwhile thought on which to end a year that ought to have been instructive:
There’s a kind of righteous certainty among people who succeeded because they knew how to check all the right boxes when they were 15, a belief that if they (and you) do check all the the right boxes then everything will go as planned. High fives! (Snuffy Walden score!) [link added]
Not a lot of self-doubt, not a lot of self-recrimination. Among other things, it’s a worldview which is very unsympathetic to the failure of others, failures that could not have resulted from anything other than a failure to check the boxes.
basil.CA 