It's appropriate to write a back to school post nearly a month into the school year. I took Twitter off my phone back in July in an effort to put my phone down more often. It had become too easy to lazily open and scroll when my interest waned. That bled into time with my… Read More »
Reading Summaries
I've decided to fire up a new, static website to reflect on books I read this year. In all honesty, much of this is bring prompted by my grad school reading, but my reading list is also expanding for once classes are done and putting longer pieces together in response have helped. Anyways, I have… Read More »
Yes, Relationships Matter
I'm in some grad classes right now and in one, we were assigned to discuss, "Does building relationships with students really matter?" Prior to the discussion, we watched Rita Pierson's TED talk and read two articles: The Post on differences between white and black poverty and a piece from mic.com on white poverty in America.… Read More »
The Big Dig
Our septic system needed to be upgraded, so we took the hottest weekend of the year (so far) to do it. My wife's dad and brother spent the day with me on Saturday digging large trenches to bury leach chambers. We redid all the plumbing. We plowed a new, larger garden and cut down some… Read More »
Killing Pico (and Micro)
Earlier this year, I wrote up a really bare-bones blogging system I called Pico. It's a Python app that reads plaintext files and publishes them to a website. Well, something in serverland changed and now they're not loading. My experience with server configuration is nil, so I'm going to proclaim those two sites dead. It… Read More »
Moving back to WordPress
You might not have noticed (or you might have...who knows) but this site is now back on WordPress. I had shifted to Jekyll back in December for the speed and security of static pages, but I ended up writing less, and I didn't like that. So, it's back to WordPress. Most pages should be working… Read More »
Reflector
I wrote this as a post to a discussion forum for grad school. It seemed fitting to post on the blog as well. It’s a response to a children’s story called ‘The Rag Coat’, in which a poor girl’s coat made of rags tells stories about everyone around her. I’m not really a journaler; I… Read More »
A Case for Better Course Design
Campus Technology published an article last week about a biomed course that saw mixed results from flipped instruction. The full article is open access (CC-BY 4.0) and available to read. I’ve read and annotated the original article and I’m going to distill a couple of points from bot the published report and the CT article.… Read More »
Pico: A Tiny Blog
More of my life is run in plain text. I don’t really use word processors any more (other than Google Docs for work) because they’re heavy and not really compatible across various devices. So, I’ve gotten in the habit of writing in a text editor (Atom, at the moment) and syncing across devices with Git… Read More »
Mugs
Every Friday, our local NPR station has a segment called Michiana Chronicles which features essays by area writers. I don’t catch it often, but I happened to be driving today when it came on. It’s titled Mug Storiesand it inspired this post. I definitely have my own preferred mugs. I usually look for the wide-mouthed… Read More »
