Climbers prepare in very different ways. In his book Adapt, coach Kris Hampton describes four approaches: For Nothing, For Everything, For Something, and For Anything. The more I thought about it, the more I realized: these don’t just describe climbing. They describe learning, too. And […]
Category: Learning
Feeling Lost? Good. That’s the Point.
Why education is about learning to get unstuck, not about knowing it all The Desert Drop-Off Imagine being blindfolded, driven for hours, and dropped in the middle of the desert. You take off the blindfold, and the horizon stretches endlessly in every direction. No map. […]
First Friday: Starting the Semester You Want
The Mirror of Stress I’ve realized something after years on both sides of the classroom. For faculty, the most stressful day of the semester is Day 1. We set the systems and policies that everyone will live with for sixteen weeks — and we make […]
The Week Before: A Calm, Confident Launch
The Week That Feels… Strange This week always feels strange, doesn’t it? Summer has its own rhythm: slow mornings, flexible days, deciding what to do as you go. Then suddenly, the semester is here—and life doesn’t fit the same way anymore. It’s like parking on […]
Declutter Your Mental Backpack
It’s two weeks until summer break ends and fall semester 2025 begins! The Hidden Weight of Week -2 In the weeks before classes start, everything looks quiet on the surface—but inside, students and faculty are already carrying weight. Not textbooks. Not laptops. The mental backpack. […]
Getting Ready
As summer comes to an end I once again find myself in “prep week” – that short but essential time to get everything in place so that an amazing semester is inevitable. It’s one of my favorite weeks of the year because nothing is set […]
Things Successful Students Do
We’re whole people. You may have heard the term “work-life balance” before. Personally, I don’t like the use of the term “balance” here because it implies that work and the rest of our lives are somehow opposed to each other. Instead, let’s focus on nourishing […]
The Importance of (Every/No)thing
“Is this on the exam?” “Sort of.” I’d just shown my students how to use trigonometric substitution to simplify the process of integrating functions involving radicals. If esoteric integration techniques aren’t your thing, what you need to know is that there are many of them. […]
Integrity as a Learning Objective
It’s that time of year, writing course syllabi and deciding on the policies that we’ll be living with for the next 15 weeks! One component that always causes me to stop and think is the “Academic Integrity” section of my syllabus. Cheating is more common […]
Fear, Pride, and Exploration
Gripped. That’s the word for it. I’d just climbed three quarters of a route when I found a great place to “rest” – a larger handhold, a few flaky edges for my feet, all on an overhang. I’d hang from one hand and shake out […]
