Teaching in Lebanon - May Mikati's Blog

Are Faculty Members Like Cats? If you go to Google and type in “Managing people is like”, the rest of the sentence will come out as “her...

Reflecting on Student Expectations Other than high grades, what do university students want from their educational institutions in gener...

Reckless Words Pierce Like a Sword The power of words is a mystifying thing. Gossip, for example, has been described as a form of verbal...

Post Nubila Phoebus The Latin proverb “post nubila Phoebus” should, in my view, be applied to the internet, imbuing the proverb with a d...

Top Liberal Arts Blogs The web site University Reviews Online lists “The Top 100 Liberal Arts Blogs”. The chosen blogs are arranged und...

Reflecting on Teacher Blogs Lately I’ve been looking at a variety of teachers’ blogs. It’s useful to see what others are doing. The blog...

English Mania Now - What Next? In 2009 the American entrepreneur Jay Walker argued that the world’s mania for learning English is good b...

Teacher Quotes When the new academic year starts, the frequency of my blog posts will probably decline as I’ll be much busier. Lately, t...

Blended Learning: "The Best of Both Worlds" Blended learning, also known as hybrid learning has rightly been described by many...

Should Students Work or Learn? The term “work” is used synonymously with “study” when it comes to describing what is expected of student...

Considering Workplace Metaphors As a language teacher, I am rather fond of metaphors, and among those I have analyzed with my students a...

Reflecting on Affirmative Action The subject of affirmative action is a highly controversial one in the U.S. for several reasons, includ...

Analyzing University Rankings From my point of view, this year’s global university rankings have been propitious. First of all, AUB has ...

Avoiding Workplace Gossip Here is a follow-up on the topic of workplace noise and chit-chat. One form of such noise is gossip. From th...

Handling Office Clutter My previous blog post was about office noise and one way of escaping it. Besides the chatter, there is also the ...

Headphones in the Office My first use of office headphones took place several years ago when I attended an international online conferen...

Workplace Etiquette/ Netiquette Etiquette is a broad subject relevant to various aspects of one’s social life, including school, air tra...

Soaking Up the Sun, and Not Just for Fun! How could sunbathing help with your career? Isn’t the idea a little far-fetched – possibly out...

Connecting With Students If you are a university teacher these days, you are likely to find yourself connecting with students not just d...

How Jogging Can Jog Your Memory No, this posting isn’t about the fitness or weight loss benefits of jogging – that’s really old hat! Wha...

Long Summer Holidays Long summer holidays can bore one to death if unplanned. I don’t often opt for a long vacation in summer, but when ...

Head in the Clouds The internet has transformed teaching at AUB to such an extent that one may safely claim our heads are now in the clo...

To Blog or Not to Blog The democratic nature of the internet is well-expressed through blogs. Ever since blogging came into fashion, I h...

The Feline Population of AUB In my student days, the campus cat population was much smaller than it is now. No one ever really seemed to...

AUB Campus Parking There isn’t much to be said really about parking on campus except that it’s been a controversial issue ever since I f...

Flashback Three: To Publish or Not to Publish? Well into my thirties, I was often mistaken for a teenager on campus. Around the year 200...

Flashback Two: Coordinating the Extension English Program A few months after joining the English Department, I was asked to coordinate t...

Flasback One: A Bumpy Start Back in 1991 when I became a full-timer at AUB, I received a memo inviting me to my first Arts and Sciences f...

After Twenty Years at AUB "Twenty years?" you may ask. Yes, I've been a full-time instructor in the Department of English...