West of the Moon

academic

debate is trying to kill me.

Have I mentioned this?  My school has a debate team now, and I’m their advisor.  Or coach.  Whatever you want to call it.  We were at a big tournament today, and I will spare you the details (for now) but I was on the Columbia campus from 7:15 this morning until 8:30 this evening, and [...]

Tags: debate, life of a high school teacher

the commonplace ailments.

Another link to Ta-Nehisi Coates, because that is apparently what we do around these parts.  He was reflecting today on the view of death and sickness that emerges from nineteenth-century primary sources, and it rang very true to my own experience with archives.  When I was working on my dissertation, I was working mainly with [...]

Tags: lancing boils, ta-nehisi coates, william james

summer driving.

Sunday morning, driving on I-95 somewhere in the middle of New Jersey, I passed an exit sign that indicated “Shore Points” and I was immediately struck with the powerful urge to take that exit, to head down the shore and spend the rest of my day at the beach or on the boardwalk, somewhere sun-soaked [...]

the ending is also the beginning.

I read a book recently where one of the characters kept having a very specific kind of premonition. Every once in a while, he would do something, and then suddenly know that he would never do that thing again. “This is the last time I will ever pet a dog,” that kind of thing. It’s [...]

Tags: berkeley, new york

authority and the classroom, part two.

I mentioned in the previous post that, before I started teaching for the first time, I asked some colleagues for advice about how to establish myself as an authority in the classroom.  At that point, before I’d ever walked into a classroom as an instructor, I phrased the problem in terms of “controlling” the room.  [...]

Tags: history, students, teaching

authority and the classroom, part one.

I’ve been trying for a few days to put together my thoughts on the extremely complicated issue of classroom authority; in the end, I’m breaking it into a couple of parts, to make it more manageable. Part One is a story, because telling stories is one of my favorite ways to make sense At the [...]

Tags: authority, gender, teaching

math on the bias.

One of the projects I’m working on at the moment is a series of articles for an upcoming encyclopedia of world history; I’m writing a set of short pieces for them about various aspects of science and technology in the ancient and early medieval periods. Two of my assigned articles deal with Indian mathematics in [...]

Tags: bias, history of science, teaching

oh dear.

Things that do not inspire confidence, number one: All of the lights on my hallway are off. I don’t think it’s an electrical problem, since the lights in my office work. It does, however, create the vague impression that I’m working in some kind of horror movie set. Things that do not inspire confidence, number [...]

Tags: berkeley, technical difficulties

what we’re doing here.

This June, it will be ten years since I first started keeping an online journal. I was going to say something like, “online journal, that’s what we called them before they were called weblogs,” but that’s not entirely true.  Online journals were always much more about personal narrative, telling stories about your life.  They’re by [...]

Tags: personal history, weblogs

africa reading challenge.

I’ve decided to join the Africa Reading Challenge, which I first learned about from Matt Cheney. It’s pretty straightforward: read six books this year that are either about Africa or by African authors. Ever since I first put together the unit on African science for my survey course on science in the ancient world, I’ve [...]

Tags: africa reading challenge, mixed media