b.rox

In the recovery planning efforts that followed the flooding of New Orleans, we often heard the mantra that we need to have “the community involved in the schools and the schools involved in the community.” I first heard this from Clifton James. I’m sure he was repeating an aphorism, but it made an impression on [...]

Why We Pulled Our Daughter Out of a Private Suburban School and Enrolled Her in Public School in New Orleans — a headline intended to provoke. New Orleans public schools have such a bad reputation. How on earth could we send our daughter there? It’s an act of hope. Also trust. And determination. And a lot [...]

Monday morning we got up bright and early. After breakfast I dressed my daughter in her new uniform. Then we got on the bike and rode on down to her new school. Last year Persephone went to Pre-K3 at a Catholic school in Jefferson Parish on the West Bank. It was a good experience, I [...]

Watching The Theologians this weekend reminded me: I finished work on another movie earlier this summer and never wrote about it. It’s a five minute animated version of the Old Testament. Believe it or not, this took me five years to complete. If I’d cleared my desk and worked on nothing else it probably would [...]

What’s in an Acronym I work at an HBCU. That acronym is not recognized by my spellchecker, nor was it in my vocabulary until I came to work here. It stands for “Historically Black College or University,” a term which requires even more unpacking. In a nutshell, the story is this. Once upon a time [...]

I’m actively looking for ways to integrate various aspects of my seemingly disparate interests. Having Rising Tide here on the campus of the university where I work was a major integrative accomplishment for me personally. I don’t mean that it was particularly onerous, because it wasn’t; but it was extremely gratifying. Of course I tend [...]

Over the past year or two I’ve become increasingly interested in the idea of contemplative pedagogy. This is the notion that we can foster a more thoughtful way of living and learning in our students and in ourselves by cultivating reflective and meditative practices in our teaching. To this end, I’ve relished the opportunity to [...]

Today was Persephone’s first day of school ever. She’s going to a small Catholic school on the West Bank of Jefferson Parish. I never thought I’d be sending my daughter there, but it’s the same school where Xy teaches, so the convenience is unbeatable. There are precious few publicly-funded pre-K3 programs in town. We don’t [...]

It’s become a tradition to take a photo of Xy as she heads off to her first day of classes. I realized this morning that we’ve been doing this for long enough that I have built up quite a little archive, going back to 2005, just a few days before Katrina. These photos kind of [...]

So yesterday I was over at Dr. Tim T’s office in the music building, helping the good doctor sort through some video issues. Midway through our session it started to rain, and Dr. T and I both agreed that it was nice to be back in the pattern of afternoon showers here in the summer. [...]

Today Tomorrow I am celebrating a dozen years here at the University. That means we moved to New Orleans twelve years and a couple weeks ago. I can’t conceive of one without the other. A dozen years of work and life at this school in this city. As previously noted, I’ve now spent a quarter [...]

This used to be a mellow time of year for me. Mostly I work with faculty, and faculty tend to get very busy toward the end of the academic year. That means they have less time to work with me. But since 2009 that’s changed. There are two new factors that have made this a [...]

Yesterday was a strange one. I busted my butt to get on campus in a timely fashion. (Persephone had a bad case of back-to-school blues — not a fun morning.) But when I got here I found the lights were flickering. We had partial power — half voltage or something like that. My boss said [...]

Sunday night, I made my presentation, “The Role of Blogs in the Rebuilding of New Orleans,” to a special interest group of the AERA. Even though the presentation is over, I’m still playing catch-up here on the blog. And so I come to my fifth and final installment of stories that have emerged in, around, [...]

This caught my eye on the the front page of today’s Times-Picayune: “It always amazed me that you had these two universities that were right next to each other but they didn’t talk to each other,” Bruno said. “Why do we have two libraries? Why do we have two cafeterias?” For a brief moment I [...]

I took these minutes on my 39th birthday, which was the day the University re-opened after the flooding of the city. What a strange day. We’d seen our city on the brink of annihilation, and the future was very uncertain. We came into our conference room, sat around the table, looked at each other and [...]

A package arrived at the office Friday containing the latest edition of a psych textbook, hot off the presses. It’s Psychology Applied to Modern Life by Wayne Weiten, Dana S. Dunn and Elizabeth Yost Hammer. That’s right, my boss is one of the co-authors. We (meaning her staff) knew a little something about this book, [...]

Yesterday we had our annual holiday open house here at the Center, and faculty came from all across campus to enjoy a variety of treats. I’d say it was pretty successful, in that we saw a number of faculty who haven’t darkened our door way for a good long while, which is the whole point [...]

So. My boss and I went to St. Louis for five days and four nights for POD 2010. Here are some notes on the whole experience. Perhaps most noteworthy, from a strictly personal perspective, was the fact that I co-presented at not one but two sessions. The first was called “Investigating Our Blind Spot,” which [...]

It’s been almost two weeks since I got back from POD 2010, and I still haven’t managed to write about it. But I find I can’t write about POD 2010 until I’ve addressed POD 2009. POD stands for the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education, and it’s pretty much the big conference for [...]