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I’m writing this on a Friday afternoon. It’s been a tumultuous week, one that followed many other tumultuous weeks. And, honestly, it’s been a barrage of news for years now. It seems unending, and, somehow, we’re only just at the beginning of whatever’s next. Regarding the news, it’s been fairly stunning to see how ill-equipped…

I picked up a move, circa late-2017 or early-2018, where I started prepping for my one-shots in the dark. (I think I picked this move up from my good friend and former colleague Rachel Stott? If she didn’t come up with it, we definitely compared notes about it.) When possible, I’d go one of my…

I quit Twitter almost two years ago. It was a place where I had made so many friends and learned so much from them, but by December 2021 it just wasn’t the same. Maybe it was the algorithm, maybe it was who I followed, maybe it was a sign of the times, but I found…

Here’s a story:  I was at LOEX in Denver in May, 2015. I was still working at Colorado State University-Pueblo, but had just accepted a position at Auraria Library ten days earlier. During a break between sessions, I was chatting with a colleague from another library in the west, a person whom I admire tremendously,…

As I wrote in my last post, I recently moved across the country, started in a new position, and am having a great time in Pennsylvania. I got the job I wanted, I live in a cool place, and I anticipate I will be here for a long, long while. That said, I did want…

Today marks two months in my new job. I’ll publish something about my search process in the near future, but for now let me just say that while this move was a long time coming, I am thrilled to be where I am. Where I am is the suburbs north of Philadelphia, working at Penn…

My sense of time has been obliterated.  In the BeforeTimes, I would have a pretty good sense of how long things took. I would often know the time without having to check a clock. I used weekly and monthly timelines to help strategize at work, and would say things like “let’s wait until after week…

I tried to keep my last post short because I knew that I needed just to get something out there to help break the writer’s block. But I’m also thinking a lot more about what I write, why I write, and how I share it. Do I really want to keep posting here? Why? Like…

This marks my first post in over two years. It’s been wild to see how much the pandemic has consumed, and continues to consume, so much of my energy and focus. It’s been harder to read, harder to write, harder to engage. During a work meeting a couple of months ago, a group of us…

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, eighteen months ago I moved into a new role as the head of my library’s instruction department, and now I directly supervise nine faculty librarians. I spend markedly less time talking with students and much more time in meetings, and am still figuring out a…

My university is cutting its budget. This fall we didn’t meet enrollment goals (off by 344 students) and are consequently making reductions across departments. I’ve attended several meetings on campus to hear from administrators, and while the situation is far from dire, I learned a couple of weeks ago that the specific dollar amount reductions…

A few days ago I published a blog post about faculty reactions to some of the decisions that library workers are making. You don’t necessarily have to read that to understand this, but it might give some more context. The library at my previous institution was built in the late 1960s, during a higher education…

Several years ago–I’m not sure exactly when–I came up with a joke to describe university faculty. I had just had a particularly frustrating conversation about some collection development decisions, and said to a co-worker “it’s almost like faculty are suspended in amber the day they defend their dissertation, and refuse to engage with new ways…

Shortly after the Presidential election in November 2016, the Washington Office of the American Library Association issued a press release indicating that the association was “ready to work with President-elect Trump.” Almost immediately after it was released, ALA members took to social media to voice their frustrations with the statement, organizing around the hashtag #NotMyALA.…

As I’m writing this the last few librarians visiting Denver for ALA Midwinter are finishing up their remaining obligations and getting ready to head home. In my case I’m back at work, just a few short blocks from the Convention Center that hosted us for the last several days, sorting through my handwritten notes and…

Last week my nephew had his first birthday. He lives across the country, which means I hardly ever see him (save for pictures my sister sends me from time-to-time), but that sting is tempered by seeing my other nephew, who turns two next month, on a fairly regular basis here in Denver. I haven’t been…

I’m writing this from a hotel lobby in Orange County, California, where the National Conference on Students in Transition just wrapped up. I’ve got a few hours until my flight and the WiFi is fast and free, so I thought I’d put together a quick reflection… I enjoyed this conference. Like, a lot more than…

Eighteen months ago I grabbed coffee with my department head. We had a few things to talk about, but the main item was the creation of a new position in our department. The person would be charged with challenging myself and my colleagues to grow as teachers. They would oversee new instruction initiatives and hopefully…

Something happened at ACRL in Baltimore last week. A group of people were criticized, but they weren’t immediately aware of that criticism. The reason for that lack of awareness is that this criticism was taking place in a discourse community that these people don’t regularly occupy. They know it’s there–people have told them about it.…

It’s been four months since the election, and the rhetoric around “truth,” “facts,” and “fake news” doesn’t seem to be dissipating. I wrote about this a few months ago, though I’ve continued to be flummoxed when considering how to address these ideas with students in class, or in conversations with friends. Meanwhile the librarian profession…

I’m writing this on my last workday of the year, so I thought I would look back on what 2016 meant for me personally and professionally. It’s all very odd–in a year I suspect will carry notoriety for the next several decades, I had a lot of successes. While the headlines seemed to go from…

Ahead of a critlib chat that’s happening today, my friend Lisa Hubbell asked that we take some time to write up how we engage in critical reflection, and how that reflection informs our practice. For my part, I journaled for my first year or so as an instruction librarian, keeping notes on what worked in…

Earlier this semester I was in an assessment meeting with a bunch of people from my department, going through student work samples and evaluating them with a rubric. The specific assignment had involved students comparing two articles–one from The Atlantic and another from a scholarly journal–and asked them to compare things like style of writing,…

Tomorrow I’m flying to Orlando to attend ALA Annual. I’m participating on a panel with some brilliant people, and I’m really excited to see some old friends, but I’m also having a hard time reconciling how I feel about the whole endeavor. I know that several of my colleagues requested this conference be relocated in…

I wrote this entry as part of the December 15, 2015 CritLib chat about #feelings. The first time I ever used the #critlib hashtag, I was sitting on a bench in the Park Blocks at Portland State University. It was the second day of Library Instruction West, and I was getting ready to give a…

I started a new job last month. Making the change has brought with it a lot of fun and a lot of challenges, and while I’m still learning the ropes and figuring out my new role, I wanted to write at least a little bit about the transition and adapting to a new organization. I…

I rode the bus in elementary school. (Middle school and high school, too, but this is about me in elementary school.) At the end of the day, if the buses were late in arriving, all of the students who rode the bus would be gathered together in a large room and watched over by a…

The last six weeks have been a bit of a blur. Between ACRL, LOEX, and wrapping up the semester, I’ve mostly been focused on what was immediately in front of me, and haven’t had a chance to slow down and look around. Now that the academic year and my two big presentations are behind me,…

It’s been eight months since I was in Portland for Library Instruction West. As I wrote last summer, LIW was the best conference I’d ever attended, in that everyone with whom I spoke was engaging and engaged. It was a bunch of instruction librarians set to the “on” position, and the ideas that were sparked…

I am a librarian who teaches. I love what I do for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is I spend my days watching people empower themselves with information. I get to be there when learners discover something new and incorporate it into their worldview. I sometimes forget how much fun, and…

A couple of weeks ago I was signed up to visit an English Composition class to talk about peer review. The instructor is a good friend of mine, and I’ve been developing this lesson for the last few years, so I was feeling pretty good about things. Then, the morning of the class, I learned…

Last week, Inside Higher Ed posted a very short article about Purdue University, which investigated the relationship between use of the campus gym and student GPA. The study found that students who visited the gym roughly once a week throughout the semester had higher GPAs, and the gym is now seeking to prove “whether there…

First, if you haven’t already read Nicholas Schiller’s excellent post on assessment, go do that. I can wait. Done? Great. Let me just say how well he articulated how “assessment” can be a loaded term, and how our profession needs to be mindful of how we approach it. Nick paraphrased another colleague, who had said…

One time I heard an anecdote, likely apocryphal, about a meeting of allied leaders during World War 2. Roosevelt was having everyone drink martinis, which spurred a discussion about the appropriate proportion of gin to vermouth. Churchill poured himself a measure of gin, then, while looking at the French delegation, waved the bottle of vermouth…

I’ve been working on a research project for the last six months with a few colleagues on my campus. Although the paper is nominally about graduate students in a Teacher Education program, a lot of my thinking has gravitated toward the notion of “lifelong learning.” There are lots of definitions and concepts associated with that…

Finally back at work after a week away, trying to decipher 15 or so pages of notes from Library Instruction West. There are so many new things I heard and learned, and I’m sure I’ll come back to other specifics later, but here are some of main themes I observed in the sessions I attended…

I grew up in Florida, where one old adage was that “the south is a place, the north is just a direction.” I guess the idea was that while there are regional identities, they’re much more centered on specific cities and states, and that the south, uniquely, has a wide-reaching character. And I mostly subscribed…

This is the first entry on my new website, the creation of which has been a strange endeavor. For several years, I eschewed having too much of an online presence, preferring to focus on “real life,” rather than whatever the internet is. I felt, and in many ways still feel, that online discourse is inherently…