What I'm Reading This Week #15

I managed to post two weeks in a row and then life got in the way again! The first article for this week explains, in part, why this was the case. 

• Colleen Campbell, Soha Hassoun, Stefanie Israel de Souza, Sazana Jayadeva, Emmanuelle Marquis, and Kerstin Sailer. Institutions Must Do More to Accommodate Those With Long Covid. Chronicle of Higher Education, October 27, 2022. 

As someone who is dealing with long Covid, I was interested to see what suggestions the authors would make and, in particular, if they had come up with the perfect solution! Of course, they didn't, but it was helpful to be reminded that I'm not alone. It's hard to talk about having long Covid because I don't want to sound like I'm whining, making excuses, or hoping to win people's sympathy. Instead, it's just a fact of life these days that I need to manage my energy every day and there are going to be times when I just can't do anything other than lie down. Also, I sometimes have trouble focusing on reading, which means that the theme of this blog isn't necessarily completely accurate. This week, for example, it probably should be "What I'm Noticing This Week and Hoping to Have the Energy to Read at Some Point in the Near Future"!

Along those lines, here are a couple of teaching resources that seem like they could be useful/interesting:

• Active Learning Library: allows you to filter by modality, activity time, class size, etc to find activities that you can quickly integrate into your classes. This showed up in a POD Network email list.  
• Math Escape Rooms: seem like a cool idea although I haven't had a chance to try any of them out yet. This link came from Alice Keeler, who does awesome things with Google products.
• Michelle D. Miller. How to Make Smart Choices About Tech for Your Course. Chronicle of Higher Education. 

On the face of it, the next article is aimed at faculty of color, but I think the actual audience is much broader since it falls to all of us to identify and dismantle systematic barriers that faculty of color face. Learning more about the experiences of faculty of color is one place to start:

• Elwood Watson. What Faculty of Color Need to Know About a Tenure-Track Career. Chronicle of Higher Education, October 31, 2022. 

Next, an interesting addition to the recent conversations about organic chemistry courses. I actually started out as a chemistry major before deciding to switch to math after talking with Douglas Bridges, who was the chair of the Math department at the University of Waikato at the time. I chose chemistry initially because the possible career paths seemed more obvious to me. Luckily, Professor Bridges convinced me that I could get a job with a math major!

I took Inorganic Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, and Physical Chemistry in my first year at the University of Waikato. I don't remember much from those courses beyond the fact that Physical Chemistry was fun because it was a lot of math, and all of these courses just required me to memorize a lot of information, which didn't seem particularly challenging or interesting to me. I also spent lab time worrying I was going to break something or cause an explosion. I wasn't meant to be a chemistry major!

• Pamela Gwyn Kripke. Reflections on Failing Organic Chemistry (Opinion). Inside Higher Ed. October 25, 2022.  

Lastly, a couple of new posts from people whose writing usually resonates with me, with these two posts being no exception:

• Oliver Burkeman. Everyone is (Still) Winging It. The Imperfectionist, November 3, 2022.
• John Warner. There's No Right Way to Ungrade. Inside Higher Ed, October 24, 2022.