I’d like to tell readers about a couple of cool things Richard Bland College is doing. This is partly because I love my institution and I want it to be a successful place, but it’s also because I think these programs are innovative and might help put Richard Bland College of the College of William & Mary on the proverbial map.

The first program is called the Language Institute. This is a partnership with Main Street Virtual Learning, and it uses an online platform that looks like one of the best I’ve seen. Students learn conversational languages, and Main Street’s parent company has a long history of working with military personnel to teach useful language skills. It’s unlike traditional language classes in that students learn how to speak the language, but they probably won’t learn so much about writing or reading the language. As the marketing material says for the Language…

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I have a manuscript. It’s a memoir of sorts, chronicling my path from the newsroom, to the classroom as an adjunct, to getting fired, to unemployment, to a tenure-track job. My purpose is multifold: to encourage college administrators to look to the adjunct pool first when hiring, to help adjunct faculty members realize that there can be life in academe beyond contingency, and to present an entertaining tale of an underdog.

But there’s a problem with the manuscript. It’s short. Not incomplete, just shorter than the average nonfiction book, and much shorter than academic nonfiction. I still have some tweaking to do, but it’ll probably be 25,000 to 30,000 words. My manuscript is meant for an audience of readers who are academics, but I’m not sure it’s an “academic” book. It’s also unusual in that it is a combination of my story and previously published pieces from this blog and other…

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I’m a little behind on my MOOC, but I can write about what it’s been like so far.

First of all, I didn’t think I’d like the video lectures, but they’re actually kind of helpful. I’m a face-to-face guy, or at least I thought I was. As a student, I’m finding that I actually love the videos because I can pause and go back as often as I want. It makes me think about being in front of the classroom, when I impart glorious wisdom onto students. How much do they miss? I miss an awful lot in a video, so I pause it, go back, and do that two or three more times. In class, the students do ask me to repeat myself or to explain further, but I wonder how often they must wish they could do it just one more time.

The downside to video lectures is just that—they are lectures on a video. The professor, Denise Comer, from Duke University, does a nice job of asking questions and trying to get us to …

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I’m taking a class I normally teach … sort of. I signed up for “English Composition I: Achieving Expertise,” a Coursera-hosted MOOC taught by the Duke University professor Denise Comer. The course started on March 18.

I signed up for a number of reasons. One is pure curiosity. So much information has been going around about massive open online courses that I wanted to see what they were all about for myself. Also, not only do I want to teach online, but also I think I need to teach online if I want to remain relevant in education’s future. Unfortunately, I’ve been hard-pressed to find adequate training nearby. There’s really not a whole lot of training anywhere that I can find. Sure, I have read about teaching online and how to do it effectively, but I’d rather have a little more than that.

I had signed up for a different MOOC at first, another Coursera course called

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I thought I was a pretty contemplative person when it came to the English language. In grad school, I thought a lot about the ways words work in the world. The process sharpened when I was a newspaper editor and got even more interesting when I started studying the nuances of our language in my teaching career. But nothing has made me contemplate the power of words like my 4-year-old son, Gavin. It’s almost daily that I consider in a new light something I’ve said or heard. Here are a few examples.

“Hardly”

Before a couple of months ago, I’d never thought twice about the word “hardly.” (You might say I’d hardly thought about it.) My son has a knack for using adverbs well, something that makes me, his English-professor daddy, proud. For example, in describing Christmas lights, he would say, “They’re shining brightly.” I get chills when he does it. But “hardly” is a tough one. I can’t…

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