Je ne suis plus étudiant en français ni prof de FLE, mais ça continue à me plaire quand je fais de petites améliorations de ma connaissance de la langue de Moliére. J’aurais aimé me rendre compte de certaines choses quand elles m’auraient aidé professionellement, mais bof.

Today is the first day of that sacred season of “I’m done with school but kiddo isn’t yet,” so naturally, I am spending it with a kiddo home sick from school. 😅

In hindsight, I should not have waited for the day I wanted to submit final grades to do the obligatory annual reset of my institutional password.

Faut que j’arrête d’écouter le nouvel album des Cowboys fringants en voiture—trop difficile de conduire les larmes aux yeux.

I reject surveillance culture in my teaching, which means I don’t ever make a systematic effort to check for evidence of cheating or plagiarism, which just means that the obvious evidence I find anyway just makes me all the more angry.

For someone who is actively apathetic about professional and collegiate sports, I can get dangerously close to being that dad at kiddo’s soccer games.

Kiddo had extra book fair money this morning, so she went back and bought her teacher a small book on a topic she knew her teacher likes 🥹

Currently doing dishes while answering kiddo’s questions about Animorphs worldbuilding. Might be at my dad peak right now.

My favorite radio episodes to download from the Internet Archive are the ones that are actually recorded from a broadcast, so you get a minute or so of continuity announcer at the beginning and the end.

It’s convenient that I’ve been reconsidering my longtime taboo about swearing at the same time that “enshittification” is becoming such a professionally salient word.

Finally got the rest of kiddo’s soccer schedule! Relieved that there’s no conflict with Eurovision 2024, because that would be a real dilemma for our family.

Kiddo’s been visiting grandparents since Sunday, and her books are still strewn about the living room, so time to admit I’m part of the problem here.

Catching up on grading today, and I’ve been laughing out loud at some of my students’ Hypothesis annotations of class readings. I’m so glad I use this instead of discussion board responses: It’s so much more organic and creates more social presence in online classes.

Kiddo is at my parents’ for her spring break and has discovered a box of my old Animorphs books. I’m excited to share yet another nerdy thing with her but also thinking about how surprisingly violent that series is for purported kids’ books.

Teaching password security in class today, so time to talk about Ozymandias’s total lack thereof in Watchmen (and how dumb it is for a computer to say “almost there!” when you enter an incomplete password).

Really want to make a joke involving Holy Saturday and the 1990s comic arc “Reign of the Supermen,” but those ingredients are all I can come up with.

Turns out that biking to and from soccer practice might be a bit too much to ask of kiddo in a single night. At least I got to chat kids and bikes with one of the other soccer dads.

I’m getting this second-hand, but it sounds like the textbook for one of our classes is giving students the impression that Aaron Swartz was a cybercriminal, and now I have lots of curriculum questions.

“By the way, daddy, I don’t really have laser eyes. I just made that up as part of the game.”

Doing some quick math to compare how old I was when I first watched Star Wars to kiddo’s current age. Also hoping my parents haven’t tossed out the cassettes I got at that age in case I want to hunt down a VHS player and watch it that way.

I’ve never really gotten any practical use out of my political science minor from college (understandable, since it was mostly a way to recoup classes after changing majors), but I appreciate how it makes me look smart to my spouse when we watch politically-themed media.

Several times in recent weeks, I’ve packed a lunch, “realized” I’d forgotten a fork, rushed to add one to my lunch bag, and then opened my lunch on campus to find two forks in there. I often joke that I became a professor because I already had the “absent-minded” part down, but still…

“You’re not a dentist. You’re just my parent who occasionally checks my teeth.”

This week has enough writing (and deadlines!) that the utilitarian appeal of ChatGPT is finally clear to me; and yet, it’s also so much clearer that I would rather do fewer things well and on my own.

Okay, my new favorite fun fact about myself for ice breaking activities is that Wil Wheaton has read my name aloud as part of his recording of a Cory Doctorow audiobook.

My Apple Watch is generous and congratulates me for a full night’s sleep even if I miss my goal by a few minutes. My body, on the other hand, is more demanding and keeps reminding me I needed more sleep.

Present me forgot to take pseudoephedrine this morning and was dreading having a congestion headache all day, but past me left a stash in my campus office that I’ve just raided. Thanks, past me!

Everyone else seems to be getting over The Family Cold, so if I can just avoid catching it in the first place, we’ll be on track for a fun weekend.

Trying to figure out which circle of hell it is when three people in a row fail to recognize a message is coming from a university listserv and reply all with “hey, think you meant to send this to someone else!”

I spent 12 hours last week working on a small, open journal’s WordPress site, and I came away from that with a new, begrudging respect for what they’ve done with the Gutenberg site builder. The same things that made me cranky in terms of my personal site make sense for larger scale projects.

“Dad, what’s a… lunch-ee-on?” “A Luncheon? It’s an evolution of Eevee. Lunch-type Pokémon.” “Dad! No, it’s not!”

It’s remarkable how much of my service in academic organizations has come down to “oh, hey, you know WordPress, don’t you?”

Sometimes, a run produces a runner’s high and sometimes it just makes me tired the rest of the day. Stayed up too late last night, so there’s a lot riding on this morning’s outcome.

I think what bothers me about “improving learning” approaches to educational technology is that it tends to prioritize utilitarianism at the expense of everything else. Ethical concerns about AI don’t matter if grades go up, what students should learn about is largely shoved aside, and so forth.

Can anyone recommend a newsletter/CRM platform for a small academic organization with a limited budget? I’m managing our membership and emails through Mailchimp right now, but they’re pivoting hard to AI, and I’m ready to leave once I find a solid alternative.

I like that there’s a They Might Be Giants lyrics bot to follow on Mastodon, but I’m dealing with a lot more TMBG songs stuck in my head these days.