“I started my career in education as an English teacher in Japan. The experience was life changing for me. I previously had little desire to pursue a career in education, however my experience teaching – and learning from – my elementary and junior high school students has steered me toward my current profession. The thing…
I’ve been using the ‘flipped classroom’ approach to teaching since before I knew what the term meant. I’m sure I’m not the only instructor who intuitively felt that talking at students for a few hours each week, and then sending them home to do outside work wouldn’t be the best learning strategy. Instead, I had…
Because it’s Valentine’s Day, and we should all have a little more compassion and love for each other on this (slightly too commercialized) holiday, here are some moving teacher/professor quotes to make your day a little sweeter: “My teacher thought I was smarter than I was- so I was.” “Every kid is one caring teacher…
Sometimes you just need to take a pause. I’m not talking about putting the brakes on a romantic relationship, but I am talking about giving your creative side some time to breath. So many of us these days are adamant about chasing our passions. We’re afraid that if we’re not careful and disciplined enough about…
“I never planned to be a teacher. In fact, my mother (a teacher) steered me away from the profession. In college, my interest survey said I should be a catholic nun/teacher. I thought the survey was screwy – I wasn’t catholic and had no plans to be a teacher. After I finished my masters program…
Mondays are the days that I pack up everything in my life around 9 am to head to a local coffee shop (usually Panera). As many people know, there tends to be a bit of Sunday night anxiousness that’ll remind you about everything you need to take care of on Monday, and that feeling each…
In the article, Top 10 Education Technologies that Will Be Dead and Gone in the Next Decade, faculty members voiced their opinions about what classroom technology they believe will be gone within the next 10 years, which ones they hope might become obsolete, and what they believe their role as instructors will be versus the…
The other day I was reflecting on some of the ‘mistakes’ I’d made in life that I no longer see in a negative light. Instead, I now feel pretty lucky that some of these things happened, and I’m sure if other people took a look back on the events that led them to where they…
While I was trying to come up with ideas for a blog post today, I thought it would be interesting to re-read my New Year’s resolutions from 2016 that I had shared here on Happy Professor (copied below). So instead of coming up with and sharing new goals for 2017 (honestly, I really just want to…
It can be hard to be patient, compassionate, and loving, but these are all qualities I think we could use more of, especially during the holiday season. I’ve set a goal (that I borrowed from comedian Whitney Cummings), that when dealing with anyone this week, I’ll say ‘I love you’ in my head before engaging…