The Glow

Tonight as I drove home, I saw an extraordinarily bright orange-yellow glow right on the eastern horizon, over the town of Bastrop, Texas, which suffered from such severe wildfires this summer. It was, of course, an unusually large, bright moonrise through a veil of clouds that magnified and dispersed the haunting light.

Yet for several miles down the road, over and down hills, hidden by trees and the ever teasing cloud it was very hard to tell for sure whether the glow brought beauty or disaster.

Document

The human memory is an amazing thing. It is essentially unlimited in capacity, yet, the storing and retrieval system is exceptionally buggy, unless carefully trained and disciplined.

One of the hardest lessons I have to keep learning as an educator, and then need to pass on to my teaching assistants is to document every significant conversation with a student, especially if you are making an exception to the syllabus or other policy. Either you or the student (or both) will misremember (accidentally or deliberately) key details of what is agreed upon. As soon as possible after the conversation, I try to send to the student an email laying out the terms of the discussion and ask them to reply to it confirming their agreement to the terms…if I don’t forget because of the next ten things that intrude upon my attentions before getting back to my computer.