Worst Professor Ever

I’m still tweaking format stuff, but I’m not fighting with domain transfers and DNS servers so I thought I’d explain more about what happened during the hiatus.

In the first place, I decided the blog had become too education-y. Not that I’ve ever needed much of an excuse to speak my mind about fools trying to run education, and I’m happy to help disempowered teachers have a laugh. But as of late, I’d started to feel pressured to write about education, in some official capacity, all the time. And that was keeping me mired in the past. See the new About page for more.

If I’m really going to integrate learning and real life, I have to write more about what I’m actually doing, which is web design, joke-writing, and public speaking — great methods, IMHO, for communicating with normal people about history or whatever else you care about.  What frustrated me most about academia wasn’t the material I taught, it was the admin, the stupid social pressure, and the ridiculously ineffective delivery system for knowledge. So while I’ll continue to critique that (oh so happily) I figure I should also do something, y’know, constructive with my time?

Also, reading Matt Taibbi’s fearsome satirical response to Paul Ryan and Tina Fey’s superbly written Bossypants, I remembered why I loved comic writing — the elegance, the fury, the wit. And that takes a helluva lot of work, enough that it’s not going to happen three times a week. Speaking of funny, that’s another thing I miss: publicly obsessing about humor. It’s a weird hobby, but it’s basically the thing I love best in life. So you can expect to see more about funniness in the near future, in some form or another. See also the Funny page.

Finally, I just read Professor X’s In the Basement of the Ivory Tower and realized that if I’d have to up the ante if I wanted a book deal.  Also, remaining anonymous was basically a way of keeping ed jobs as a “backup plan.” Several random people have pointed out that this was kind of a dumb thing to do considering how happy I was to when I left. And that I don’t have to be anonymous.  Sometimes it’s better to cut off your exit strategy, and burning bridges is in my Celtic-Magyar-Hun genes anyway.

So: my name is Amanda Krauss, and I’m a recovering academic.

And now I’m going to return to some PHP that needs my attention.