We at Profhacker like our gadgets. Much of the time, we talk about our digital tools or the things we use when we are online to make our lives easier. There is one analog tool, though, that I'm not sure I could live without, and I know I could not travel without it: my air machine. As I think about it, it might have been fellow ProfHacker Natalie who first told me years ago about traveling with one of these. I know for sure that I first used it while traveling to the Modern Language Association conference in 2006, and it changed my travel life forever.

That may sound a bit dramatic, but it's very true. I am an incredibly light sleeper. Any shift in noise or light is likely to disturb me. At home, my partner and I have created a bedroom that works for both of us, but travel has always wrecked havoc on me. That year at MLA in Philadelphia, I slept amazingly well.  Even though...

As director of my university's first-year writing program, I hire twenty to thirty adjunct faculty members each semester. I also worked as an adjunct for three years before I took my current permanent position. Adjunct faculty positions often do not follow as clear or consistent of an application process as tenure-track or other more permanent positions, which makes it difficult for some people to know how they can most effectively attract the attention of those who hire. In this post, I will offer ProfHacker readers a few concrete steps that will hopefully help them find adjunct positions more quickly and easily. First, I must be clear that these are the steps that I know will work with me and my program. Because of the lack of consistency that I already mentioned, it's highly possible that another person at another institution will want to follow a different process, and I ...

There was a day in graduate school when one of my fellow students and I went to lunch in the student union. While sitting in the corner with steaming plates of pepper steak, she said, "Do you realize that every single professor in our program has either never been married or has been divorced?" We went down the list of names and recognized that she was exactly right. Since she and I were both in longterm relationships we wanted to last into the future, this discovery disturbed us. We spent the rest of our lunch talking about why relationships might be difficult to maintain in academia and what to do about it. As I've moved from graduate student to tenured professor, I've had similar conversations with others. It's a topic that's often on many people's minds.

Whether relationships are more difficult to nurture within academia than outside of it is something for other people ...

Last week, Billie Hara kicked off a new series here at ProfHacker that will cover, as she so eloquently put it, "the transitions we experience and move through in higher education." Her entry covered incredibly important advice for those who are starting their first jobs on the tenure track. While Billie just completed her first year in such a position, I'd like to write a little about what I learned this past year, my first year after earning tenure. It's a touchy subject, I'll admit. For so many, tenure is the Holy Grail of academia. So few get the chance to pursue it let alone earn it. That's probably why there is so little discussion about what to expect after completing such a major goal. In seeking input for this post, though, I have found out that many experience a range of emotions and even a fair amount of confusion about what to do next. Hopefully, with this post (a...

A few weeks ago, I walked to my university's library to pick up a copy of Tanya Horeck's Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film that had been sent to me through interlibrary loan. As the student worker brought the book over to me, she glanced from the book's title to me and back again. When I handed her my ID, she looked at my name and said, "Oh, you teach Gender Studies, don't you? I've heard of you." It's true that I have a bit of a reputation on my campus. Last year, I taught a year-long honors seminar on the theme of pain that coincided with a public lecture series. Each week, we would meet to talk about Abu Ghraib, crystal meth addition, rape jokes, or artistic and literary representations of personal and public traumas. Earlier this semester, one of my advisees referred to me as the campus sex-and-death guy.

Colleagues often ask how and why I teach...

Those of us who teach on the semester system are in the middle of graduation season (and those on the quarter or trimester system will be approaching it soon). For a lot of people, graduation is the most important event of any academic year. It represents for many of us the entire reason colleges and universities exist in the first place: to guide students through a series of courses and requirements until they finish everything and earn a degree. I do not teach graduate students at my institution, so graduation for me is about seniors, many of whom arrived at my school as teenagers fresh out of high school. In any year, graduating seniors are excited and stressed all at once. Considering the current state of the economy in the United States, many seniors are feeling more stress than others have before them. While faculty usually cannot find jobs for them or help them too much once the...

It's rare during the semester that I read the weekly cover story in the New York Times Magazine from start to finish, but I did just that a few weeks ago. In "Building a Better Teacher, " Elizabeth Green describes Doug Lemov's work as a consultant hired by school districts facing decreasing test scores, distressed teachers, dissatisfied administrators, and disgruntled students. Lemov has developed a national reputation as someone able to noticeably improve learning in such districts, which has led to the recent publication of his book, Teach Like a Champion: Forty-Nine Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College. Many who teach at the college level might choose to ignore a discussion about teaching strategies for elementary, middle, or high school students, but I found much of what the article had to say about Lemov's work to be compelling. I not only read the...