by Jenae Cohn | Sep 4, 2013 | Personal, Professionalization
When I went to college, I remember purchasing a digital camera for the first time. Its functionality was pretty basic, but all I really wanted to do with it was create brag-worthy content for my brand new Facebook account. Of course, I also had some serious archival...
by Jenae Cohn | Jul 18, 2013 | Literature, Personal
I’m having trouble turning off noise today. It’s all kinds of noise: cell phone noise, social media noise, inside brain noise. There’s something poetic about being consumed in this “white noise” considering I am in the postmodern phase of my prelim reading. I think my...
by Jenae Cohn | Jul 9, 2013 | Literature, Personal, Professionalization
I’ve been sent to an administrator’s office. The hallway is long, sterile, inevitably linoleum. I’m ushered into a room with taupe walls and stock art. A secretary barely notices me. Then, it’s time to talk to the Man in Charge. “There’s been something of… a mix-up in...
by Jenae Cohn | Mar 20, 2013 | Pedagogy, Personal, Professionalization
Las Vegas casinos, with their long hallways, patterned carpets, and mirrored walls, are designed to disorient. Last week, I stayed at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, NV attending the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and found myself moving in...
by Jenae Cohn | Feb 20, 2013 | Personal
Every six months, I go through this cycle where I wonder if I’m a sham. I’ve identified myself as a “writer” for most of my (young) adult life, but I frequently find myself in a self-loathing moment where I wonder, “If I don’t...
by Jenae Cohn | Oct 6, 2012 | Pedagogy, Personal
She had the “OK, I get it” gaze. One of my students – I’ll call her “Abby” – sat in the back of the classroom and she just had that look: the set jaw, the arms crossed, the eyes just a little glazed. She got it. She got this...
by Jenae Cohn | Oct 1, 2012 | Pedagogy
I glanced at the clock: 7:50 A.M. Everyone’s here? Now? I teach UWP 1, freshman composition, in a computer lab this quarter and behind every monitor sat a student waiting to begin class. They were all ten minutes early at the already inhumane (at least by...
by Jenae Cohn | Sep 11, 2012 | Personal, Uncategorized
In elementary school, I used to create binders for each class I took. I slipped hand-drawn covers into the plastic pockets at the front of each: “MATH!!” swirled in purple glitter or “HISTORY!!” emblazoned with heart stickers and rainbows. The...
by Jenae Cohn | Aug 17, 2012 | Personal
Endings discomfit me. The recognition that I will likely never return to a particular place again tends to evoke within me this slight surge of panic, this almost instinctual desire to reclaim my ownership over that place (or at least reclaim my control to be in that...
by Jenae Cohn | Aug 9, 2012 | Digital Literacy, Personal
“Is anyone going to get this?” Today involved a lot of grumbling over my keyboard at the office, not because I disliked the task at hand so much as I questioned the utility of it. This, of course, is a consequence of that inevitable malaise at the end of a...
