• For semesters, terms and courses that end and then begin again—if only they would end sooner and begin later.
• For students (sometimes not very many) who come to class prepared and ready to learn.
• For students (sometimes too many) who don’t come prepared and don’t care about learning. From them we learn humility and how far we can stretch to reach.
• For students who figure it out and forget to hid their joy.
• For PowerPoint that makes content look way more impressive than overheads ever did and projects with bulbs less likely to burn out.
• For librarians who navigate data bases and run search engines, skilled and delighted to show students and faculty how they too can manage information.
• For email that brings notes from now successful former students. And extra gratitude for those willing to admit what we told them was right.
• For grading software that corrects errors, assigns meaningful comments, and tallies the points. For that day when it’s available and let it be soon.
• For new colleagues who can’t believe they’re getting paid to do what they’d almost do without pay but are happily doing for almost no pay.
• For old colleagues still in love with their content and on fire in their classrooms.
• For department heads who care about teaching with something other than lips.
• For questions with answers that raise questions in a knowledge circle that expands but never breaks or ends.
• For minds still nimble and restless enough to pursue those answers that raise questions.
• For classrooms with furniture that moves, for clean floors, empty trash cans, chalk in the tray, a computer that stands ready, for places and spaces that convey the sanctity of learning.
• For feedback that helps students to grow and faculty to flourish.
• For a job, less like work, more like a vocation with meaning and purpose, that on good days makes a difference and on bad ones still holds promise.

—Maryellen Weimer

If your institution offers online courses, you know that finding quality adjuncts is only half of the staffing battle. Keeping them is sometimes even more difficult. Defections are common as adjuncts report feeling disconnected from the campus community they serve, and there’s always competition from other schools who may offer a better pay rate.

Students not doing the reading or other assigned homework—I’ve already done more than several blog posts on the topic and lots of articles in the newsletter. Hopefully all the “coverage” has offered grist for your thinking and new strategies worth trying. Despite all the previous “coverage,” I’m still finding there is more to be shared on the topic.

Faculty careers are often divided into three phases: beginning, middle, and end. New faculty have been studied in some detail—probably because of the great influx of them. So have senior faculty, although less than new faculty. But what about that expanse in the middle? Researchers Baldwin, Lunceford, and Vanderlinden (reference below) quote sources describing mid-career faculty as “perhaps the least studied and most ill-defined period in life.”

Becoming a department chair does not always follow a smooth or particularly well-thought-out process. Most faculty, who have no academic leadership training, need real support to make this career transition a successful one.

“I’ve never been outside of Chicago before,” confided a student as our van approached Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He was one of five community college students visiting the campus for their upcoming summer internships as part of the Chicago-based Undergraduate Research Collaborative (URC) called STEM-ENGINES (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics - Engaging the Next Generation IN Exploring Science).

This may not be the best time of the semester to bring this up: Some students are already getting on your nerves? Nonetheless, I thought you might be interested in a typology that identifies the different ways students nag their professors. Usually we think of nagging as something children do to parents or spouses do to one another, but some researchers think it happens in the classroom. Here are the seven different kinds of “nags” perpetrated by students on their teachers.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the only people using Web 2.0 applications were Millennials and other early adopters. Today Web 2.0 tools are making serious in-roads into the higher education community as valuable weapons in today’s teaching arsenal. And while it’s no surprise that students are drawn to these applications, what may be one of the most unexpected technology trends in higher education is the number of faculty members using them as well.

Educational assessment is one of the most talked about topics in higher education today. Despite the admirable goal of improving student learning, the trend toward greater accountability through increased academic testing carries with it a diverse range of educational assessment tools, methodologies, perspectives, and stakeholders.