Professor Beej

These past few weeks have been crazy.  Things are finally settling back down, and I hope to be able to get back to a regular blogging schedule sometime soon.  One of the last details that needs to be finalized within a few days are the reading lists on my syllabi.  For the most part, they’re [...]

Out of the three Comp II courses I taught this semester, I found a shocking statistic: no one read.  No one.  Okay, well maybe that’s an exaggeration, but not by much.  Across these approximately 60 students, I found that when I assigned H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” only five people actually admitted to reading [...]

I teach a course at my college called First Year Experience 101.  It’s an introduction to college life for–you guessed it–first year students. Whether they are traditional straight-out-of-high-school 18 year olds or worked-my-life-away babyboomers, new students at my school go through FYE to learn college-appropriate study skills, life lessons, and time management. Why Me? I [...]

I never really knew what my academic specialty would be. I originally thought about being a medievalist, but talking a single class on Chaucer where our entire text was in Middle English turned me off of that idea. I then had no idea really where my specialization would come from. Half of my indecision came [...]

I ran into a slight snag in class Friday. I’ve been afraid of this kind of snafu since I started teaching, and it has only now surfaced. When I was in graduate school, I had a professor who loved him some MLA format. He loved it. He knew it backward and forward and inside and [...]