School School School
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Tips for Emailing Your Professors – From a Professor!
In recent years, one of the most common things I’m asked about by students is email. Specifically, how to email your professors. When I first started getting this, I was a little confused by it – until I realized that we’re at the point where none of our traditional students remember a world without IM or texts. For the current batch of college students, communication has always been getting increasingly informal, and increasingly instantaneous, and so it seems that many find themselves anxious about saying “the right thing” when sending a formal email to a professor for the first time. So I’ve decided to compile some tips about how to…
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12 Tips for Adjusting to College from a Student Turned Professor
This year marks my 7th year teaching college. It’s an absolutely CRAZY thing for me to think about, since it seriously just feels like yesterday that I was receiving my MA. But time marches ever forward, and with seven years of teaching under my belt, in addition to the five years I spent in higher ed. as a student, I feel like I’ve picked up a few tricks of the trade along the way. Between the mistakes I made and lessons I learned as a student myself, and the years I’ve spent watching class after class of new freshmen arrive (and then graduate!) – here are the top twelve tips…
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Back to School Week: Academic Advice from the Other Side of the Desk
So here we are at our last Back to School Week (that turned into two weeks because I’m still not quite back in the blogging groove) Post for this year! Some academic advice direct from your resident student-turned-professor. Being relatively young for a prof certainly has it’s benefits in being able to give this kind of advice because I am both familiar with professor expectations (having them myself!) and remember keenly what it’s like to be a student. So here are Magpie’s top 9 pieces of academic advice for the college student! Go to office hours. Seriously. Your professors have that time specifically set aside to meet with and help…
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Back to School Week: Common Faux Pas When Communicating With Professors
So, funny story. I’ve literally been agonizing over this post for a year and a half. I had originally intended it to be part of back to school week LAST year, but ended up chickening out of posting it. Why? Because it seems like a fairly good topic, and probably (hopefully) contains sound advice… Well, mainly because so many other articles I’ve read that are written by professors and deal with this kind of stuff take on such a negative, snarky, and frankly condescending tone. And I don’t want this to be like that. I don’t want to be like that. So I’ve tried my best not to be. Students…
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It’s That Time of Year Again!
I’m really about a week late on this one, but even now, colleges and K-12 schools alike are beginning to trickle back into session. As an educator it’s without a doubt my favorite time of year. So much excitement! So much potential! So many OFFICE SUPPLIES!!! I love it. Back to school season is second only to Christmas in my books. And to celebrate not only this, but also my triumphant return to blogging on a relatively regular schedule, we’ll be kicking off the school year with some school themed posts. Most of them will be aimed towards higher education, since that is after all the level I’ve been teaching for…
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Magpie’s Adventures in Bullet Journaling
Bullet Journaling has really fascinated me ever since Jenn from With Luck Blog brought it to my attention way back when I posted about planners. The concept seemed to work really well with the system I was currently using for my to-do lists, but there was one big issue with it – the inability to plan ahead by more than a month or so. As a freelance musician, I sometimes book weddings and masses months and even years in advance (funerals, not so much), so the lack of a static monthly calendar in the system was a major flaw for me. But everything else seemed so great… so I decided…
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Monday Update
It’s been a looonnnnggg but boring and busy few weeks, with minimal time for creating bloggy material and content happening in my life, so I figure it’s time for a quick update on what’s been keeping me occupied. I’m… …working on: grading research papers. I’ve got 105 five to seven page papers to work through. Even just looking at the stack is overwhelming. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s all for the greater good. And that the massive amounts of unpaid time I use notating and commenting on their writing will help them in the future because they’ll take what they learn from this experience and apply it…
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18 Pieces of Advice for Your Freshman Year of College
It’s that time of year again, a new group of starry-eyed, excited and – lets be honest – a little scared freshmen are about to flood campus with their under-bed boxes packed to the brim and their half-weepy/half-releived parents in tow. I enjoy this time of year so much, watching as all these fresh faces navigate their way from terrified and trying to hide it to truly feeling at home here – watching a whole new generation of people fall in love with the campus that has meant so much to me over the years. As these college newbies flood in, I can’t help but think about my days in…
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Motivation
Just a (very) quick update to let everyone know what I’ve been up to. This week I’ve been… …planning: for the semester! I’ve let myself get very caught up in course planning this past week. My schedule is a little different this semester – one of my courses is a longer class period than I’m used to, so I’ve got quite a lot of lecture shuffling and schedule adjusting to do on top of the usual revising I do every year. …working on: a few more text-heavy posts for here. They always take me a little bit longer to write because of the obsessive compulsive drive to revise anything eight…
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What I’ve Been…
…planning: Pysanky designs. The easter season is over, yes, but I plan to keep making them year-round this year. I really need to start honing my skills and getting creative if I ever plan on using this to drum up some extra income. …working on: grading. And more grading. It’s crunch time, and of course, as I always do, I ended up planning tests and papers too close to one another. Every single semester I say to myself, “I’ll plan this out better next semester…” And I try – I really do try – but no matter what, somehow it never works out. Right now I’m plodding my way through…
