The Random Thoughts of Louis Schmier

It is a chilly, damp, wet, placid Saturday morning during which I was struggling, really struggling, to think about a message early yesterday morning. In it was a request from an education major at a mid-western American university. She had been given an assignment (I won’t quote her descriptives of the professor)to contact some teachers [...]

This is unique. It is the dark of evening and not of dawn. You know on the plane flying home from the Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University last night, I was thinking. I should have been sleeping. My body was so stiff I could have sworn it was in the throes of [...]

Negatives and positives. Obstacles and possibilities. Problems and opportunities. I was thinking about these couplets as I waltzed through the dark this crisp morning. Late Monday afternoon, as the fates would have it, a bunch of stuff came together like tributaries at a confluence: the moaning and groaning of a lot of faculty about students, [...]

So much moaning and groaning. So much complaining. So much condemnation. So much accusation. So much self-pitying. So much tearing of clothes. So many ashes covering mortarboards. So much exchange of academic robes for sackcloth. So many going around in barefeet. Have you heard them? Have you seen them? It’s so rampant and deafening that [...]