21st Century Scholar

The Thrusday Pop This fall, I am teaching about 45 first-year graduate students. When I look back on the first 14 weeks of the semester, I am struck by how stressed out they are. Yes, there is the usual stuff about writing good papers, managing class participation, and making connections in a new social setting. [...]

When today’s college students were born, hardly anyone used e-mail or had a cellphone. Modern communications have evolved so much since then that many young people now consider e-mail to be passé, and they would be mortified if they had to use a landline. They prefer to stay in nearly constant communication via texting, Facebook, [...]

It’s an odd experience to write a dissertation. Almost by definition if you get to the Ph.D. dissertation writing stage you must have been a decent student. Take my own experience as an example. I liked writing; I got good grades. I had written a lot of term papers. I passed my quals and the [...]

Let’s jump forward 20 years. Let’s also make a few commonsense projections: the internet/web/social media will continue to improve, and credentialing will only increase. It’s hard to argue with #1; we may disagree with the assumption of #2, but I don’t think that’s debatable either. That is, some may say that credentialing is wrong, etc., [...]

Some years ago an article in The Los Angeles Times discussed the explosive growth of yoga in southern California. I certainly have seen that growth in Silverlake; there must be a dozen yoga studios within two miles of our house. One of the points the article made was that at the time yoga instructors did [...]

This blog—the first of the academic year—now seems like an annual tradition. Over the past two years, I have started the year writing about my hopes and anticipations for the upcoming year. Today’s post is no different. Some feelings don’t change. For instance, there is nothing like the excitement of the first few weeks on [...]

by Randy Clemens During my last year of teaching, I decided to pursue an Ed.D. The search process was simple. I started with cities where I thought I could live and teach–Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, Austin, Boulder, and Berkeley. I had dreams of New York, where I could ride the subway to everything, of Austin, [...]

by Bill Tierney After two years as the academic dean at Fort Berthold, I went to Stanford.  Although I had a clearer idea about why I was going to graduate school than when I got my Master’s, if truth be told, I simply wanted to read more.  I liked working at Fort Berthold, but I [...]

by Bill Tierney I could begin at the beginning and talk about being raised in an Irish Catholic family, but instead I’d like to jump forward to graduate school.  I majored in English at Tufts, went off to the Peace Corps, and returned to Boston at the end of my assignment to get a Master’s [...]

by Randy Clemens This time two years ago I taught English to tenth and twelfth graders. The tenth graders read Of Mice and Men, which most did not like. The twelfth graders read Dante’s Inferno, which most did like. While all the students counted the days until holiday break, I waited to hear from the nine universities to [...]