Yesterday I took a deviation from my standard topic of young adults through real adults wrestling with writing papers, red tape in education, and their own internal motivation. I talked about a new middle school teacher and how excited I was for her students. I shed years writing that post, in part because it was like going back in time to middle school myself. Today I want to go back even further. “Where Did He Learn That?” is about my very young son. You can read the Fatherhood Blog for more information abut him, but it occurred to me (as … Continue reading →

Most of the time my posts are specifically about college or about tips for young adults in a paper-writing or presentation giving mode. It’s what I do and what I know. It’s been a long time since I was in high school. Reunions (plural) have already taken place apparently. I’ve missed them, sadly. They were arranged — poorly — via social networking services. It seems that attendance was well under ten percent as a result. At any rate, I’m fairly well focused on the older crowd of students. That’s not a bad thing at all. But today my focus shifts … Continue reading →

Recently I’ve been agonizing over the perfect draft. You see, I’m writing a dissertation and, as my topic of choice includes ever-changing content, I’m constantly reevaluating my work. Is it current enough? Should the structure change again? Is this ready to be reviewed? Will I just be wasting their time? What else might I think about including? Have I done too much? What if something happens tomorrow that changes everything? What if…? It’s a complicated little game I play in my own head. While my dissertation may be the most important document I’ve tackled so far, I experience this type … Continue reading →

Have you ever had to do something important — something very very important — that kept being held back by something unimportant? Perhaps you’re cooking something wonderful to eat, every flavor is perfect, you’re just about to bite into this wonderful meal you’ve made for yourself and someone with a clipboard and an eight-hundred page manual knocks it to the floor because you had it on the wrong color of plate. Has something like this happened to you (not the food thing, obviously, but something along those lines)? This has been happening to me recently and it’s not very pleasant. … Continue reading →

Yesterday I urged that you alter your perspective by asking WW*D? The asterisk can be replaced by whatever you wish. A professor, a parent, a mentor, a younger sibling, a friend, an enemy, a character from a video game — whatever. The purpose, of course, is to get you thinking differently about the task at hand. How can you look at this from another angle, in another light, at a different magnification, and so on. It turns out that by looking from another angle you often find another way of doing things, or another way of learning, or understanding, or … Continue reading →

Sometimes I get exhausted trying to think about what to do next concerning a project, a paper, or even a single line of text. What comes next? I can wonder about this for hours. What should I write next? How can I move this forward? I ask these questions for a while before becoming very disillusioned about the whole state of my project or paper. At this point I’ve sort of shut down and I must go do something else (take a walk, read a non-related book, etc.) before coming back to the task at hand. While stepping away from … Continue reading →

Being a parent makes things more complicated if you’re also a student. I’m so fortunate to have a supportive wife and son. As a parent/student (and occasional teacher) I thought I’d let you know that I know. While there are many things that make being a student complicated (loans, jobs, grades, assignments, bad teachers, extracurricular stuff, pledging, etc.), being a parent has been, for me, the most difficult by far. I don’t want to imply that I wish I wasn’t a parent (because I love being a Dad), but I do want to empathize with other parent/students out there who … Continue reading →