Once in a while I like to include some simple quotes here on the Happy Professor blog. From past experience, I know that at some point throughout the next few years my once favorite quotes might be sadly forgotten (they tend to pile up on Post-Its, in notebooks that get discarded, and in various lists…
If you’re a teacher in elementary, middle, high school, or college, you may notice that the importance of certain classes often evolves with time. And while change is often important, we may not always be aware of the potentially negative consequences that follow. A few years ago, one of the schools I worked at was…
I went back to the classroom yesterday for the first time in a very very long time (for me, that means it’s been almost a year of fully online teaching). Oh, how I had missed every part of it. Printing out my class rosters, putting on actual clothes and makeup to leave the house, the…
During the past few weeks, I’ve been a student in an online faculty development course to prepare myself to teach an upcoming International Business Communication class. The course focuses on global learning, but much of the material discusses the basics that college instructors need to know (and potentially share with their students) about simplifying the…
Although Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) have been used in the classroom for decades, and I feel fairly well-versed in different teaching methods, I can honestly say this was a new one for me until I learned about it in a recent faculty development course. VTS tends to be used in more artistic or visually-reliant fields,…
I had an epiphany last week (ask anyone who knows me well, many of my sentences start with the phrase, “You know, I have this theory..”). So let me rephrase that, I have this theory that there are certain things that help us or hinder us when trying to get into ‘flow’ as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi…
Since I started phasing out energy drinks over a year ago, and then gradually eliminated my daily coffee fix, I’ve been trying to find a way to keep my productivity up. As someone who works from home on a computer every day and relies on self-motivation, this has not been easy without caffeine. You see,…
When I wrote the book Happy Professor two years ago, I was living in a studio apartment with my husband, who drove a beat up car and was interning with the company he now works for, while I drove to college campuses all over Central Florida to teach as an adjunct, only having dabbled in…
If you haven’t figured out how to cut down on the time you spend answering student emails, I may have the answer for you! When I tell other teachers that I have a number of stock email responses ready to go in the Notes app of my iPhone, some of them are relieved to have…
As I was reading Shonda Rhimes’ book The Year of Yes the other day, I started feeling like I wasn’t quite measuring up. In my mind, I had been living the ‘year of yes’ since I was a college freshman, deliberately grabbing every opportunity that came my way, and I had decided that 2016 would…