Students are interesting creatures. Teachers too! There are all kinds of complicated interactions that happen inside classrooms, the kinds of complications that don’t often happen in comparable ways in other parts of students’ lives. It can be like a pressurecooker of all kinds of different energies, and as a teacher, you’re right there in the thick of it, sometimes without any idea how to direct it all! Good classes usually find a way to direct it themselves. Me, I find giving students as much autonomy as possible, within clear a framework, is the way to go. But even so, the …

I’m one of those people who can ignore annoyances for a little while, but eventually gets fed up with them and decides to do something. And of course, for this I get headaches, most of the time. For example, the mailbox for the Foreign Professor’s residence on campus. Over the last few months, I’d noticed that checking mail had become somewhat of a chore, an annoyance, and finally an impossibility. The reason is that the damned mailbox — a single cubby on the wall of the security office in another building on the other side of campus — was completely …