By Any Other Nerd

b So for those that do not know or have not figured out, I’m a big fan of books.  No, I’m not a full out bookslut nor would I call myself a bookwhore and I’ve worked extremely hard not to be a book-hoarder .  Yes, I have lots of books.  In fact, I recently treated myself to two ginormous bookshelves for them (see below).  Two 7 feet tall by 4-feet wide bookshelves from The Mill Store .  Worth every cent!  So in the end, I’m a big fan of books and have accumulated a good amount. Whenever I’m about to criticize someone’s collection of hub-cabs, pez-caps, etc, I look to my shelves and say; am I really any different?  Sure, I can make the argument that my books have “knowledge” and “stories” and have taught me a great many things.  But often, that is the case with any collector.  I could argue that I only keep the “really important ones”; which is amusing since I have hundreds (I’m afraid to actually count and discover that number might even...

Synchronizing Technology, Classrooms, and Material Frequent Flyer adjuncts can feel like their life consists of repeatedly having to bring the mountain to the people.  Synchronizing information, technology, material, and communication across multiple schools can be next to impossible since most schools have no interest in doing so, thus Frequent Flyers are left to their own devices for maximizing their resources to reduce the amount of redundancy in their world.  But in the digital age, adjuncting can be much easier. Copier technology has become a god-send and all those copies I used to have labor to make (fighting off other faculty tooth and nail for the copier) and lug about from campus to campus are bygone days.  Many of the new copies allow you to scan to email.  They operate as mass scanners in which you can turn those handouts into PDFs and put them online.  Nowadays, I hand out the syllabus at the beginning of the semester and all other material can b...

Well, it’s been a year since I started this blog; so go me for beating the odds and being among the blogs to actually survive beyond the 6 months.  I’m also congratulating myself on managing to be somewhat reliable and post a few a month (most months) and manage about 60 blogs in the first year—that’s just over 1 a week.  I’m hoping to improve that in the next year, but who knows.  And ultimately, I shouldn’t be too proud of that since a reasonable portion of those posts were repostings of things published elsewhere.  So how has blogging been for me?  Fun, frustrating and rewarding.  Fun . I’ve been enjoying having a forum to put together semi-coherent thoughts and put them out into the world for people to read.  I’ve always enjoyed writing and this gives me a means of writing about things that grab my attention and feel I can talk about with some level of intelligence.  When I get into a post that I’m thinking about, I find myself smiling an...

We’re all aware of them (and I say that at the end of the week when Charlie Sheen has for all intents and purposes gone off the deep end; who knows by the time you’re reading this, he may be an uber-celebrity or you may be asking “Isn’t that like saying Britney’s gone crazy or Lindsey’s got arrest?”—it’s a bit ubiquitous).  For many of us—sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly—we experience these moments of popular culture “history-in-the-making” that we in some part internalize or feel to be a part of us.  We mourn the passing of a celebrity, attend a major film on opening night, attend ritual event that grants us access into a particular event, or are witness/participant to some other event.  Some of these events become over amplified through media outlets while others stay upon the fringe but still captivate fans.  Ultimately, these moments are part of our individual narratives, yet also shared with many others.   These moments are as numerous and diverse a...

So many of you know, I’m vegetarian; which may make what I’m about to do seem kind of strange, but bear with me.  Of late, I was reviewing the audio version of the book, The Veganist:  Lose Weight, Get Healthy, and Change the World by Kathy Freston.  It is a book about, well, veganism.  I will try (unsuccessfully, no doubt) to avoid commenting on the book’s content; that is a post (actually several posts—see, there I go again) for another time.  My focus right now is simply on the cover and its presentation.  I'm having trouble swallowing this cover.  Or rather, I'm feeling messages coming from this cover are problematic.    The iconography of the cover is problematic.  Here is a blonde-hair, green-eyed fashionable woman serving me (the presumable purchaser of the book), aq beautiful, but largely hard to decipher play of food.  She's clearly in a kitchen or some room connected to the kitchen.  Taken together, here is o...

It began with my Contemporary Affairs teacher in high school.  He was a copier.  His classroom and office were fire-hazards filled with 3-4 foot tall stacks of photocopied articles that he would share with his students.  In all of his classes, no one would escape a minimum of 5 handouts a class (there was no textbook; just handouts).  By the end of the year, I had hundreds of interesting articles.  But let’s face it, that approach is not sustainable and time consuming.  But with that in mind, last spring, I started up a blog that I would use for teaching. For the rest of this article, check out: Adjunct Nation's Freeway Flyer . Did you enjoy this read? Let me know your thoughts down below or feel free to browse around and  check out some of my other posts! . You might also want to keep up to date with my blog by  signing up for them via email. This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License ...

To some, Larry Gonick is a cartoon genius in all senses of the phrase; for others, he's more like a cartoon madman.  In 2009, Gonick published his fifth volume in the Cartoon History series, thereby spending some 1400+ pages depicting the history of humanity in comics.  He has been kind enough to grant me an interview for this blog.   LANCE EATON:   You spent some 30+ years composing the Cartoon History series?  How does it feel to be “done” with it?  Are you done with it? LARRY GONICK:   Yes, I'm done with it. When I finished, I felt great! Proud! Master-of-the-Universe Powerful! Then a few months went by, and I began to feel as if the organizing principle of my life had disappeared. Vacuum at the center. I kept asking myself, "if this was a lifetime project, is my life over?" Then those feelings faded. Now I just get up in the morning and go to work. I still do feel happy to have finished what I started, though. EATON:   Wha...

“yo prof what’s homework for today  —me”  (typical email received 10 minutes before class at least five times per semester from different students) Email is the great communication tool and the giant headache for the Freeway Flyer. More so than other adjuncts, we end up with having to juggle email at multiple schools and have more students, on average, to respond to. Keeping it all together requires a little bit of organization ahead of time to maximize your time spent throughout the semester. I’ve developed several strategies for coping and they include the obvious: clear communication and redundancy/repetition. When it comes to email, I insist on students... R ead the rest of the article at AdjunctNation.com Did you enjoy this read? Let me know your thoughts down below or feel free to browse around and  check out some of my other posts! . You might also want to keep up to date with my blog by  signing up for them via email. This work is licensed under a...

I don’t want to call it an addiction; because honestly, I can walk away whenever I want.  But I realized that to support my predilection for adjuncting full time, I’ve assembled a range of jobs that help me keep doing what I enjoy.  In other words, I have jobs that help support my full-time job.  Granted, I’m not in the stuck in the situation of those full-time Wal-Mart employees who still qualify discounted state-funded healthcare, but I do find that in order to keep everything flowing smoothly, I hold onto several other jobs and am constantly keeping an eye on potential jobs to fill the gaps (for both current teaching and non-teaching gigs).  But really, I can walk away whenever I want.   In total, I am employed by 10 places (5 colleges; 1 residential program, 4 publications).  Over several years, I’ve synergized my various skills, interests, and goals so that my jobs overlap or help one another.  For instance, some of my writing includes revi...

I encountered Gareth Hinds several years back when I first started doing graphic novel reviews.  A graphic rendition of King Lear by Hinds came across my desk and I rather enjoyed it.  Shortly thereafter, I learned that Hinds was a local artist in the greater Boston area.  At the time, I was creating a roundtable discussion of several people involved in the comics industry for an even at North Shore Community College and his name instantly popped into mind.  Since then, Hinds has gone on to publish Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice as well as most recently, a wonderful graphic adaptation of The Odyssey.  He has been kind enough to be interviewed for this blog.  EATON :  So you’ve done Beowulf, King Lear, Merchant of Venice and now The Odyssey.  What pulls you to do the classics?  What do you feel you can add to them by putting them in comic form? HINDS :  This question could cover a lot of ground, but let's just say that I want ...