Workshop Junkie

I have a confession. I'm a workshop junkie. I fucking love going to workshops—especially workshops about teaching and pedagogy. I feel like I always have a lot of ideas floating around in my head and I get inspired very easily, so workshops provide a great environment for me to talk with others and learn new ideas and strategies for my courses and scholarship. And lately I prefer writing about teaching more than writing about my research, so workshops are yet another opportunity for me to develop innovative new course ideas. Lastly, going to workshops is self-serving. Inevitably, while I am learning new ideas, I am also getting reassurance about my good practices. It feels good to know I am doing the right thing and help others to improve their courses.

Luckily for me, attending workshops is a good activity to include in my tenure file at Westfield State and a great way for me to meet new people. So far I’ve gone to workshops about creating study-abroad courses, teaching green behavior at the K-12 level, biases in teaching evaluations, developing new writing assignments in the classroom, and writing on alternative platforms like blogs. That last one was today, and as I said, I’m easily inspired, so I decided to revive my old blog.

In the past, I ranted about politics and current events, which I might still do from time to time, but I want to try to make this more productive. Ostensibly, this blog will be about teaching and pedagogy, but it will also be a way for me to try to reinvigorate my love for writing and help me to get motivated to work on my dissertation revision (blerrrrrrrrrrrrrgh).

I want to pledge to write once a week, but I will surely break that pledge. Instead, I will just try to write often. I want to feel productive and enriched from this, not burdened.