November 24, 2017

I’m posting this a few days early because our work week closed up shop Wednesday afternoon! Whenever you’re reading this, I hope you’re feeling cozy, surrounded by people you love, or feeling connected to them in your heart and maybe your cell phone.

1. “The Struggle is Real: Facilitating Information Literacy Learning by Being Leaders of Failure,” Liz McGlynn Bellamy, LOEX Quarterly. This is behind a paywall, but here’s my favorite quote: “If failure is normalized by myself (as the supposedly all-knowing instructor) and intentionally built into my pedagogy, that can give students the space and permission to experiment and persist in the face of research struggles.” I have been thinking a lot about how to ease student anxiety about research, and I think admitting it’s a difficult process and that even the “experts” sometimes run into dead-ends can be valuable.
2. “Get Off Your Ass and Talk to People Face-to-Face,” MEL Magazine. Interesting to read that emotional intelligence is not a fixed personality trait, but a skill to learn. This last bit made me say “wow” aloud: “…Talk to people in person whenever possible…When digital communication was introduced to the U.S. military in the 1980s, “these old-timers who had been in Vietnam hated it,” Kolditz remembers. Kolditz asked the detractors to explain their position considering calling in an airstrike digitally was, ostensibly, more accurate than doing it over the phone.
   “They said, ‘Listen, sonny. When I was in Vietnam, we could figure out who needed the airstrike first because we could hear the panic and fear in their voice. When this digital communication comes in, how are you going to prioritize that?’”
3. A Holiday Survival Guide for Sad People. This is a really valuable read. I have been a sad person at the holidays, and for friends and family who are going through it this year, I love you. Be gentle with yourself.
4. How I Completely Changed My Morning Routine for a Week. I really like this idea, of trying out a few indulgent slow-down types of activities for the first hour in the morning. She found that she was able to take more time for herself than she felt in her busy routine. I’d like to try this for a week, with different activities, and see what results.
5. Meet Doug Jones, One Of The Biggest Movie Stars You’ve Probably Never Seen, Buzzfeed. This was a really cool profile/interview. I haven’t seen half the movies he was in, but it’s fascinating to see the type of skill required in communicating emotion and timing while made up and wearing plastic appendages. I think my husband would find this unusual character actor interesting, given his abiding love of monsters.

Bonus features:

• A Photographer’s Old College Classmates, Then and Now, New Yorker.
• Movie Sex Is the Worst: 10 Myths That Need to Go, Man Repeller. Knocking things over to show how hot they are for each other has always bothered me especially!
• 6 Beautiful Thanksgiving Tablescapes, The Crafted Life. SO CUTE.