Aw, Professor

1,000th POST

I began this blog -- which I sometimes call my "main blog" -- in 2008. At the time, I had just started using the center of my faculty home page to highlight examples of environmental geography as I see it. Those examples are still there, but the new platform of blogging seemed a more effective way to add many kinds of examples, and emerging social media platforms made it easy to share those examples with a wide readership.

I recently realized that I was approaching my 1,000th published post (quite a few more remain as yet-to-be-published drafts), and I decided to celebrate with something fun. Coincidentally, I recently started making my own "Aw, Professor" memes, which friends and followers on Facebook really seem to appreciate. These are tongue-in-cheek words of unsolicited advice that echo themes found on the Not-the-13th Grade section of my faculty site. It seems fitting to gather all of them on this post, to which I will add any more that I end up creating.

In honor of the hundreds of students who have tolerated the group assignment
 in my Secret Life of Coffee course.
In honor of professors who try to apply what we teach in our classes
 to what we experience in our bureaucracies.
In honor of teachers who manage to teach despite the over-management of teachers.
In honor of Georgia Senator John Lewis. 
In honor of poet Tom Wayman.
Thanks to all of the students, colleagues, and randomly-encountered readers who have encouraged my blogging. If you want even more, see www.doctor.coffee for links to my other blog projects, several of which I share with my lovely wife and favorite librarian, Pamela.

278,872 page views, and counting!
Lagniappe
Below are memes in this series created after the initial May 9, 2018 post.
In honor of spellcheck and autocorrect, without which this blog itself -- and
even this meme -- would be impossible.
In honor, of course, of the farmers.

In honor of dynamic classrooms, where I can learn from students every day.
In honor of professional soccer, for placing faith in the unity of a continent that our country's president is doing his best to divide.
After a bit of a hiatus, the meme is back. I hear earnest-sounding public officials
using this technical term, most recently in the science-free zone of North Carolina.
Lagniappe-squared: the memes keep coming...
In honor of students in my African geography course, for whom this was
my actual answer to an actual question before a quiz!
(They did not say "Aw, Professor" though.)

In honor of colleagues at a campus-wide conference many years ago,
who were struggling with the question of how to make our teaching relevant
in the so-called Real World.
"In geography," I told them, "the Real World is a big part of what we do."
And yet education bureaucracies continue to ignore it assiduously! 

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