Something New!

Teaching #HISPinParis is really engaging as a teacher in large part because I get to introduce students to new places, some of which they probably wouldn’t see otherwise. That said, it’s pretty rare that I get to see something completely new to *me*. I lived in Paris for the first 15 years of my life […]

Friendly disagreement

I am in Paris for #HISPinParis22. It’s my first time back since 2019, the longest I’ve been away from my native city. As usual, one assignment for the class is that students have to blog about their experience. Personally, I haven’t blogged since < checks website for first time in months > April 2021. Yikes. […]

The new normal

I spent over a decade pouring my heart and soul in this site. I perfected the pages for my classes, constantly updated to new plugins, read up on WordPress changes, and generally spent lots and lots of time making the site as useable and pretty as possible. And then COVID.UMW required that all courses be […]

back to the drawing board

I’ve now spent over a decade railing against the use of LMS. I’ve put my money where my mouth is, too, developing my materials on this site, keeping them available without a paywall, and making interfaces as easy as possible. My ethical objections to the LMS hasn’t changed, and I still hate the way it […]

“FUN” STUFF FOR QUARANTIME

Planning/architecture/preservation related movies: Hello, everyone. If you’re reading this it’s because you’re desperately bored. Well, let me help to the best of my abilities. Here are ideas/links/arts/whatevers that I’ve collected or been sent from around the internets. I’ll keep adding stuff as I go. Enjoy & stay safe! Videos I made with my kids (I […]

A few thoughts on a few museums

I used to be a museum professional. It’s funny, because I’m not the “museum person” in my department and since it’s not my field of research, most students have no idea I used to work in museums for a living. While I’m retired from being a museum professional, I’m still very much a museum aficionado. […]

Art de la rue

The #HISPinParis19 students took lots of neat pics while we were in Paris, and after a month and a half back in the US, I’ve finally found a few minutes to look through my own. Among the 10,000 shots of my kids – yes, I’m that mom – I did manage to take a few […]

Mexican Food in France: does it exist?

I am currently two weeks into teaching HISP 470: preservation abroad in Paris. My students have been writing wonderful posts about their experiences, focusing on topics like the rehab of Notre Dame, the variety of churches in the city, dealing with trash and recycling, etc. This post is nothing so serious, though it does discuss […]

It’s all fun and games (until you build a city)

I posted semi-recently about the convergence of my nerdery and work interests with the Urban Design Alignment Chart. That was a fun little project, but last fall I joined those two interests more seamlessly. So seamlessly, in fact, that I didn’t even think twice about it until just now. Last semester, I taught HISP471VV: Urban […]

Notre Dame: Follow-up Thoughts

Since the Notre Dame fire, I’ve had lots of interesting conversations and fielded many pertinent questions. I thought instead of endlessly repeating myself, I should write some of this stuff down. Here goes: What exactly was lost? How do we fix it? The cathedral itself took the brunt of the damage: most of the artwork […]