Revving Up

The new semester begins in three weeks (just less than that, actually), and I'm wondering where my summer went! Of course, I was teaching (both a f2f and an online course), driving around the country on great road trips (Bemidji, Madison, Chicago, New York, Montreal -- not always in that order), and next week I'll fly to San Antonio for a visit.

But I'm beginning to pull together ideas for my fall classes, and I found this new multi-authored blog: Ecology of Education | Exploring the Ecosystems of Learning.

Although the site seems primarily addressed to K-12 educators (the most amazing and under-appreciated public servants in our country), I'm finding some great information there, too. Just the metaphor alone needs to be more widely understood: Ecology, indeed!

Check it out.

P.S. Here's one more resource: a delicious.com list of sites for classroom ideas from Active Learning Carnival. I found it via the MnSCU CTL blog (see at right).

Loss. Prevention.

This morning is the funeral for a Century student, Jeremy Caulkins, who took his own life last week. His brother Chris is on our faculty and has been working on raising campus awareness about depression, the apparent cause of his brother's death (and the cause of Chris's wife's suicide some years ago).

Yesterday afternoon, I listened to the amazing writer Kate Bornstein talk about many things, among them her six close-calls with suicide: she planned it down to "a T six times," she said, but she never attempted it. She always found something to stop her, and she wrote a book about those alternatives, a radical-truth-telling book I immediately bought: Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws.

I'm going to recommend that our library order this book. Perhaps books truly are medicine.

A New Resource

I was online ordering an examination copy of Graff and Birkenstein's They Say/I Say, and on the Norton Website I found a GREAT companion site: Norton/Write. The exercises are especially good and include immediate feedback/scoring.

Give some of them a try!