Last fall, one of my former students, who is in a leadership position in the Navy, reached out for advice on how to handle one member of his team being shunned by the rest. Here’s our email exchange (which I received permission to share): Dr. H, What are your thoughts…

The tornado sirens began to wail. The cheerful songs being sung by cartoon characters over the loudspeakers gave way to warnings: “Take shelter!” “Retreat to the nearest building!” “Cover your heads!” My mom grabbed my hand and we raced for the main entrance. The leaves of the Silver Maples that…

Of course, I did. And, my eyes widened as our taxi crossed over the dividing line into a sea of donkey-driven carts, cyclists carrying two and sometimes three passengers, mopeds, pedestrians, pick-up trucks loaded down with cargo, big yellow school buses tagged with Jesus stickers, transport vehicles carrying the national…

Natural disasters, political coups and riots. We survived those. Cultural invasions and the emergence of cancerous pockets of entitlement within the classroom. We survived those as well. Running a microfinance institution in Honduras (from within a university classroom) was not easy. And, over the ten years that my students and…

I’m always looking for ways to meet my students in untraditional spaces. I’ve held class 20-plus feet in the air in a mess of ropes, lived on two dollars a day with my students, and operated a microfinancial institution in Honduras with my students for ten years. A couple years…

So, a lawyer and a teacher are at a dinner party. The lawyer is gesticulating wildly and holding court when he says the one thing that sears the ears of every teacher: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” This slight unleashes the teacher into a non-stop, vein-popping rejoinder…

I kept my arms at 90 degrees. My elbows were locked and my arms were working in harmony with my legs. I did my best to maintain optimal form as I sprinted around the racetrack at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. There were no horses running on the track that day…

A syllabus is a contract. It is a promise. It is an expression of the teacher’s pedagogy. And, in the wrong hands, in my hands, in the beginning of my teacher journey, it was an overly structured soul-sucking instrument of oppression. How so? I gave my students what they wanted…

Fear is contagious. And, in the classroom, it can spread quickly. Year in, year out, fear always reared its paralyzing head in my La Ceiba class at this point in the semester. You see Progress Report #2 was coming due. And, it was at this point in the semester when…