It happens to us all:  we forget to bring lunch.  Sometimes we just don’t have time to make anything. Sometimes we actually make the lunch, but we leave it on the counter as we rush out the door.  Sometimes we are out of bread, or peanut butter, or pickles, or whatever it is we like to include in sandwiches.  We really don’t want to raid the vending machines for candy bars and soft drinks, but we are hungry.

We have already discussed how raiding the community refrigerator and stealing our colleagues’ food is not a collegial thing to do.  So what’s left?  What does a busy higher-ed person do for food? The campus cafeteria!

To hear college students talk about student union food, you’d think they are forced to eat gruel and stale bread everyday.  (Since many students eat every meal in the campus cafeteria, and those unique perceptions might seem justified.)    But you don’t eat...

Our versatile lunch dish for today includes mushrooms!  You can use mushrooms in many lunchtime favorites (salads, sandwiches, soups), but today’s lunch, Mushroom Quesadillas, are very easy to prepare and even easier to heat for a good lunch.

Mushrooms are flavorful and can have lovely texture.  They are typically low in calorie and fat (as they are mostly water), and they are high in potassium and riboflavin (helpful in lowering blood pressure).  You can replace the mushrooms in this recipe with any type of mushroom you prefer (in the sample below, I used white button mushrooms), and you can also add other vegetables if you like (I’ve included spinach).  If you are meat eater, adding a little chicken or beef is an easy thing to do.

Ingredients

• 3 Tbls. butter (or use cooking spray)
• 2 cups white mushrooms, sliced
• 1/2 to 1 tsp. chili powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/4 cup coarsely...

The Nike slogan, “Just Do It,” has been a staple of commercials and bumper stickers for years.  It’s a motivational and inspirational saying.  Yes, I might think, if I “just do it” (run a marathon, ride in a 50K bike race, swim the English Channel), I’ll be successful (healthy, acclaimed, accomplished).  Just doing it sounds good.  It sounds like a plan.  It sounds too easy to be useful.  And it is.  Sort of.

On the one hand, if I swim the English Channel, I’ll have achieved something great.  But a lot of things would have to happen before I could do swim such a distance.  For starters, I’d have to move to Europe.   I’d have to know how to swim in very cold water.  I’d have to have the stamina necessary to undertake such a challenge.  I could “just do it,” but without proper preparation, I’d be setting myself up for failure.  I’d be...

My local grocery store, in an effort to sell more of its products, makes samples of foods and plies customers with those samples.  All this in the hopes that the customers will like the food and will purchase those items.  Their tactics work.  Today’s salad is one of those samples.

Ingredients

In this ongoing ProfHacker series, we once again take on the potentially charged subject of disruptive student behavior.  In December, Nels asked “What’s that Smell?” a post about the smells that can emanate from students who engage in illegal questionable behavior outside of class, and what professors should/could do about it.  In our first installment of this series, I wrote about how to deal with students who engage in disruptive, off-topic conversations.  Today’s post also addresses talkative students.  But instead of talking to other students and being disruptive, these types of talkers are the ones who talk to you, the professor.  And they never stop talking.

As a reminder, in this series, we present a scenario, and we’ll offer a few suggestions from ProfHacker readers about how they might handle a similar situation.  As always, many of the scenarios we...

Over the past few months, we at ProfHacker have written articles about class/course assessment and how important it is to get students’ input in class evaluations.  Certainly, course evaluations contain important information for the instructor and the university, but they rarely measure what the students actually learned in that course.  We can use traditional methods of evaluation to gauge what students have learned, and that helps us (giving tests, assigning grades).  But do these traditional methods of assessment and evaluation of student work help students recognize what they have learned?

Self-reflexivity can help students and educators identify the “what” and the “why” of student learning.  Reflexivity is not to be confused with reflection.  We often reflect on our teaching, and we ask students to reflect on their learning.  Reflection is a wonderful tool.�...

Today’s six (major) ingredient recipe is for a dish that is versatile and easy.   You can simply make some for dinner, then have left overs for lunch!  See?  Easy!  Seriously, though, the recipe has great versatility.  You can include all six major ingredients, or you can choose to leave one (or more) out of the recipe or you can replace them with other things you might have on hand.   While the original recipe includes sausage/chorizo, it is easy to leave out the meat, use vegetable broth instead of the chicken broth, and you have a tasty vegetarian dish.

For lunch, add a little water to the sausage/rice meal and heat in a microwave.  The water will help resteam the rice.

Ingredients

• 1/2lb. Sliced Sausage (chorizo, turkey)
• 2 Cups Rice (I used a mixture of brown and white)
• 1 bunch of chopped green onions
• 1/2 Cup green peas (drained if using canned peas)
• 4 Cups chicken (or ...

I have a confession to make. I’m not funny. I like to think that I’m funny. I tell jokes. I often get the punchline wrong or my timing is off, but I tell them. Unfortunately, I’m usually the only one laughing. But does my solitary laughter stop me? Oh, no. It never does. I just keep right on . . . telling jokes and laughing by myself. My second confession? I do this in a classroom.

Usually, telling badly phrased jokes and laughing by myself is OK. Students will give the fake three-toned laugh, “ha, ha, ha.” You know, the one that actually says, “you-are-not-funny,-but-you-grade-my-work-so-I-have-to-play-along” laugh. It works in the classroom, though. Telling jokes badly becomes my shtick. I know I’m not funny and they know I’m not funny. We revel in our my delusion of someday having my own comedy show.  While my bad attempt at humor can seem ill-advised, it...

Chowders are thick soups, hearty dishes that are filling and delicious.    The most common types of chowder include seafood, but they can include other types of meats and vegetables.  Fresh and seasonal foods make the best chowders.    The recipe below makes a marvelous meal, but like many similar dishes, this one is best the next day when spices and flavors have melded.   Please know that this recipe is very easy to prepare.   It is also very easy to warm in a microwave for lunch.  To have chowder for lunch can make lunchtime seem special.

Ingredients

• 1  large onion, chopped (2 cups)
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 3 cups chicken broth
• 2 cups whole milk**
• 1  bay leaf
• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• freshly ...

At ProfHacker, we have written a number of posts about the benefits of writing groups.  Writing groups are an effective way to have accountability in the writing process, to build a community of like-minded people supporting each other in that process, they are a great way to develop readers for your work.  As good as writing groups are, sometimes they aren’t enough.  You have to be in the right frame of mind for a group to succeed.

Today, we offer a way to develop that right frame of mind.

Writing is very hard work.  So hard, in fact, that most people who try are not wholly successful.  The best way define success, for our purposes, is to compare being a successful writer to being a successful athlete.  Writers and athletes have a lot in common.  Each needs to set goals for their work, each needs to identify their talent, they need the right equipment, and they need...