Tonkin to You!

  "Life happens," has become a favorite expression for many of us during the pandemic.  It's helped us explain missing deadlines, being emotionally disengaged, and in resolving the cognitive dissonance of the world we long for versus the one we witness.  The lack of updates to this blog recently are because "life happened" to my family back in February. On February 10, I received a panicked phone call from my brother's girlfriend that their house (the old family home) was on fire.  By the time I arrived, the place where I had grown up was still smoldering, brave fire crews doing their best to save the actual structure and whatever belongings could be salvaged. I found my brother at the neighbor's place, on a recliner and covered in blankets.  The fire, it turned out, had been an accident...a simple home maintenance error that had gotten out of control quickly.   Despite the potentially imminent danger to their own home, my brother's neighbors had mad...

Read any career self-actualization book or talk to a life coach and you're likely to hear a lot about finding your "true self."  One of the biggest movements of the last decade is the push for greater sincerity and transparency in the workplace.  Everyone, it seems, is urging us to bring more of our real personalities to work, to let our spirits be on full display and to live our truth. I've personally experienced the power of bringing more of my "whole self" to work with me.  Seven years back, I transitioned from a job in technology middle management to being a full-time college professor.  Although I had always tapped parts of my non-work self before (particularly my experiences as a musician and performer), I found more opportunities to let my personality creep into my daily endeavors on the education "stage."   At the head of the classroom, this behavior is not just tolerated--it's encouraged!  One of the quickest lessons learned by most co...

Before you read another word of this blog, know that I'm guilty.  I do it too.  I sometimes post things on social media or via text that I later regret.  I let my emotions get the best of me and I take the bait to respond to someone's ill-informed or rude posting, only to find that my temper flares and my words get the best of me.  Even more than politics, I think the general inability of much of the population to effectively discern between "your" and "you're" is probably my biggest hot button.  I'm in favor of a constitutional amendment requiring basic grammar literacy training prior to online political debate, but I digress..... There is a permanence to just about anything we decide to post online.  Facebook's delete account option, for example, really is a temporary deactivation feature; you can still reactivate your page for 30 days.  More problematic is that posts that you assumed had been deleted may still show up on search engines.  For t...

 "He's not concerned with yesterday He knows constant change is here today He's noble enough to know what's right But weak enough not to choose it He's wise enough to win the world But fool enough to lose it" So go the lyrics to Canadian power trio Rush's 1982 single "New World Man."  Drummer and lyricist Neil Peart passed away from cancer this past January, casting a shadow on the hearts of many music fans (including this author).  His great drumming, and, just as importantly, poetic musings on the human condition, remain as a soundtrack to our lives.  Neil's prediction that "constant change is here today" could also have ended with the phrase "to stay."  The COVID-19 pandemic thrust nearly every working person and student on the planet into a churning snow-globe of both complications and possibilities.  Concepts once considered experimental or theoretical (i.e. an entire population working from home) materialized in fron...

  There are lots of different titles for students who enter college without a major.  Undecided.  Undeclared.  Exploratory.  Open major.  These are all attempts to put some kind of qualifier in front of a student and to give the faculty context as we try to guide our charges into picking an academic path. We are humans, after all...and we crave order and labels. This past fall, I was honored to have been chosen to guide a class through a one-credit, low stakes course called "Exploratory 101: Finding YOU."  Though I found the title a little overwhelming (at 47, I'm still "finding me"), I really enjoyed where the university was headed with the concept.  The title didn't include "finding a job" or "picking a vocation," but conveyed that the person should come first. When I say the course was "low stakes," that term did not equal "unimporant."  Instead, the class was meant to NOT put additional burdens onto students regard...

...isn't all bad. As a business instructor at a small, private university, I enjoy a unique vantage point to see life from a lot of different perspectives.  I've got to keep up with what's happening within my chosen disciplines (human resources, information systems, and management) while interacting with young people every day.  These developing adults are great sources of feedback; without a doubt, they will share their feelings and their "filters" are not as developed as their older peers.  This honesty is something for which instructors should be grateful; our students, in essence, are telling us what to teach them..   In many ways, it's our job as teachers to consume the news of the world around us and to transform it into a form that our students will integrate, evaluate, and dissect.  It's wild to look back in January and see just how much has actually taken place since the "before" time ended.  As a matter of practice, I begin most of my c...

One of my favorite words in the English language is "and."  You can be a student "and" an athlete.  A banker "and" a painter.  Even a college professor "and" a bass player.  "And" makes it possible for us to have a "calico" career and lifestyle:  All of the "colors" in our lives can run in different directions and shades while still creating a useful "coat" for our career and hobby body and soul.  However, just as the cat above is running out of white space to fit another endeavor, we can run out of time, energy, or overall space for that next endeavor.  We can't (or don't want to) give up our existing patches, but we also feel the need to make a place for the new creative output.   At this point, we seem to have three choices:  A. Give up on the new project (not desirable).  B. Give up something existing to make room for the new colors (could be desirable, depending how attached we are to the exist...