Kimberly Hirsh

I have one weird set of emotions when I begin writing in a new notebook and another when I get close to the end of a new notebook, but I can’t fully articulate either. 📝

Added “Memento mori girl” to my bio and I am far too pleased with myself. 💀

💬📚 “If I’m expected to be a kin keeper, no one can judge my coffee consumption.” Kelly J. Baker, Sexism Ed ☕

📚 This week’s takeaway from The Artist’s Way is that I’m already really good at making time for the things I love to do and keeping negative people out of my business.

The extent to which my handwriting is a perfect mix of my parents’ handwriting is remarkable.

🔖 Read On Pandering. This piece made me think about how lucky I’ve been to always be writing for my past or future self or for a body of colleagues that is mostly women.

🔖 Read The Invisible Burden That Leaves Moms Drained. Especially timely since I just hosted my kid’s (outdoor masked) birthday party last weekend. I’m blessed to not have as heavy a burden as many others but it’s still there.

Excuse me I will be over here flailing because I just learned there is a licensed Star Trek TNG/X-Men crossover novel. 🖖📚📺🗯️

UPDATED TO ADD: Literally the day after I learned about this book it went on $0.99 ebook sale. Reader, I bought it.

🔖 Read Why Everyone Is Always Giving Unsolicited Advice (Tressie McMillan Cottom for the New York Times).

I had a dream that Gates McFadden became a real doctor. My kid was having breathing trouble & she helped. Then when I needed to send her a message I couldn’t decide whether to greet her as Dr. Gates or Space Mom.🖖

💻📺 Watched Salt Fat Acid Heat episode 1, “Fat.”

🎮 Played Dragon Quest III.

Each game in the series gets more expansive. I love that.

🔖Read “So Coke-y…So Entitled!”: This Is What It Was Like Going to Bennington College With Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, and Jonathan Lethem. 📚🎙️

My kid’s school is having fall break today so um we have Paramount Plus now. Because it has All the Ninja Turtles.

It’s been a busy day of prepping for my kid’s birthday party (outdoor masked at a park we’re careful) and I think tomorrow when it’s over I will crash. I spent a lot of time today making gluten-free dairy-free cupcakes from scratch so the 1 celiac kid & I will feel inciuded.

Now that I have Paramount+, my current viewing strategy is:

Want something familiar? TNG/DS9/VOY

Want something new? Discovery.

Want something funny? Lower Decks.

As mentioned long ago, I am All In On Trek. 🖖

My son found this toad at school a week ago. He said his friend touched it and it jumped.

Why are my neighbors so loud don’t they know it’s after 10 pm and their neighbors have children: the Kimberly Hirsh story

Finished reading: The Dark Tide by Alicia Jasinka 📚

🔖📺 Read Nathan Lane on Only Murders in the Building’s Big Twist.

Weather report from my kid: the air temperature is warm Luke.

One of the frustrating things about chronic illness is that sometimes you have a good brain day but a bad body day.

Here’s the deal with being employed by someone besides myself right now: they have to pay me enough that I can pay other people to do all the things I won’t have energy to do because I’m working for them.

I did a thing! I wrote a blog post for a client! Yay me! Time for a dance party!

via GIPHY

Dr. Maggie Melo writes for Inside Higher Ed today about the value of video-off time in a virtual classroom and how we might learn from the ease generated by virtual time together-but-apart and apply it in a face-to-face setting.

Dr. Melo concludes:

I want us to question why we have such a persistent desire to “see learning” in a makerspace or classroom. I want us to figuratively and literally turn off the gaze when it’s not needed. As we opt for classrooms and makerspaces that are more inclusive, we should create ways for students to choose how they want to be seen in the classroom.

My son attends a preschool that uses the Reggio Emilia approach. There are a lot of different components to this approach. One of them is documentation. The teachers at his school are constantly photographing the children as they work, posting those photographs around the classroom for the children to see, and writing captions to remind the children of what they were doing. This is not exclusively for assessment purposes. It’s process-focused. The children also take photos, which the teachers share and describe.

Dr. Melo’s piece made me wonder if something like this could be applied in a higher education setting, but placing the choice of how and what is documented on the students. Could you have a shorter class meeting time, giving students the extra solo time to work and document their own process? What if you explicitly asked them to talk about the mistakes they made and what they learned from them, like I do in my blog post about sewing napkins? Does placing this documentation power in the hands of the students allow them to choose how they are seen?

I don’t know.

I just wonder.

Just a note: Dr. Melo was my assistantship supervisor for the final 2 years of my PhD.