Today might be a big day. We might find out today if we keep the same racist, sexist, cruel, dishonest president we’ve had for the last four years, or we might find out that we get to try a different elderly, rich, able-bodied, Christian, cisgender, white male president for the next four years. We might…
“Why”…Wednesdays
95. Why Embrace Discomfort
I took the photo above on Friday, September 25, 2020. That morning, three student groups on campus, MoCaH (Men of Color at Hotchkiss), Cafe (Women of Color at Hotchkiss) and BaHSA (Black and Hispanic Student Alliance), organized a walkout. The verdicts had just come in affirming that Breonna Taylor’s murderers would not face punishment. The…
94. Why Open the Door
I took the photo from the Dovetail Custom Builders website, but it’s a photo of the barn doors on the cabin Dovetail built for us. If you want to see what’s behind the doors, you have a couple choices. Right now, you could check out their website, clicking the link for the Bristol. (If you…
93. Why Write a Guest “Why…Wednesday”
So the photo above is a behind-the-scenes peek at what my screen looks like when I start putting together a Why Wednesday post. I know that right now, everyone who reads CaritaGardiner.com knows me, Carita Gardiner, but I’m hoping that won’t always be true. I write these weekly missives with the idea that someday, when…
92. Why and When to Multitask
The photo above isn’t one I shot, but one I found on a Google image search for “multitasking.” (It comes from Scientific American Blogs.) I selected it because (1) she’s got curly hair (and I’m always pro-curly) and (2) it’s from an article called, “No, Women Can’t Multitask Either.” The “either” got me thinking. Why…
91. Why THINK
I couldn’t figure out a relevant image to put with this post, so I pasted in my all-time-favorite Tuukka photo, and I made it really big because I love the look of the hair flying off his ears. I wanted to make sure you got to see that feature. None of this has anything to…
90. Why Go Old School…Sometimes
[I wrote the following essay, as pictured in the photo above, during a power outage in August. We’ve been told Fall 2020 will be a particularly bad storm season. Of course it will.] I’m writing by hand, something I rarely do outside of the letters I write to my older daughter, who’s twenty-one, and pen…
89. Why Leave off the Grades
Doing everything online and using backward design to organize my classes has lead to many noticeable improvements in the structure of my classes. One aspect of the class about which I didn’t like the way a digital life seemed to be pushing my pedagogy was in the grading. For the last dozen or more years,…
88. Why Control What I Can
I’m still a paper calendar user. I know, not very 2020 of me, but facts are facts (and why would anyone want to be 2020?). For as long as I can remember, I’ve used a calendar that provides a two-inch by five-inch rectangle for each day’s events. This year, I decided to live on the…
87. Why NoSpendtember
If you’re reading this the first day it goes live, it’s already the second of September, but it’s not too late to join me in my annual NoSpendtember tradition. NoSpendtember started as a result of our yearly spending habits. As you know (since all of my readers know me), I’m a teacher at a boarding…