For fun, I made some certificates for colleagues. They’re all inside jokes for conference friends. Polite, smart, funny, kind-hearted people. One of them was about one guy picking on another guy. That second guy got one for being up for anything. Another certificate for was for someone running the circus. A third was for another guy, “and he knows why.”

He does not know why. But, you know, I don’t know why either. He’s just about the sweetest, most decent guy you could meet. If he’s ever done anything out of line no one knows about it and he’s buried it deeply in his subconscious. I could go on and on, but, really, we’re just lucky he’s a good friend.

Anyway, we all attend this one conference. And we’ve all held various leadership positions there over the years. We’re trying really hard to become the cool club within the club. Or just to amuse ourselves. One year, my lovely bride won the junior scholar award and at the conference and got a nice plaque. The next year, she won a top paper award and got a plaque. The year after that, I got a top paper award there. (I got nothing.) She also has some certificates from when she ran different divisions of that conference. I’ve run the same ones. (I got nothing.) In our text chat, the rest of the group realized they have been similarly shortchanged. So I made certificates.

Her certificate recognized her many conference achievements. So meta.

And so as to inoculate myself from a return joke, I made one for me.

That’s one of the two or three semi-notorious things I’ve said at that conference over the years. We were participating on a panel on the social constructs of this or that and I held up my phone and said something like, “We are all roaming little balls of hate with hate rectangles in our hands.”

Actually, I said exactly that. The quote was immortalized by someone who got a certificate today.

I get to see them in April, and I’m excited for it.

This evening I updated the images on the front page of the site. They look similar to the most recent version, but different. They look like this.

They are photos from a particular tree-covered road that I shot in October. And here I am, finally getting around to uploading them. This being one of my core hobbies, and being about five weeks behind on getting them here says a lot about my time management lately.

Maybe I’ll get better at it later this month, when the term is over, and the grades have been submitted.

At which time I’ll take three, maybe four deep breaths, and start planning for the spring term.

The good news is I only have one new class prep in the spring! (Three this semester was … a lot.) One class I have will be unchanged. The one will be new. And I’ll make some small adjustments to the criticism class. I’ll refine the details for that in a few days.

Yes, I have carved out two 15-minutes blocks of time, Thursday and next Tuesday, to figure that all out.

In today’s installment of the criticism class, we discussed this story. I chose it because it is a different sort of piece than anything we’ve read all fall. And I wanted the class to see the mechanics of how the writer wrote about the mechanics of deaf soccer. I played when I was a kid, and when I first saw this story last summer I thought, “How do they do that?” Soccer is basically played, and communicated, from behind you. But if no one can hear …

Soccer — and life — through the eyes of the U.S. deaf women’s national team

The first thing to know about deaf soccer is that it is soccer, and a match looks the same as at any level of the sport.

Instead of a loud, profanity-laced pregame speech from the most extroverted leader on the team, players gather in a circle and execute a synchronized movement of quick fist bumps and back-of-hand slaps. During the game, the center official raises a flag in addition to blowing their whistle for fouls and stoppages of play, and games are typically quieter than the average match that features more verbal communication.

From a technical standpoint, players must have hearing loss of at least 55 decibels in their “better ear” to qualify to play deaf soccer and, crucially, hearing aids are not allowed in games, ensuring all players are on a level playing field.

On a hearing team, communication often comes from the back. The goalkeeper and defenders see everything in front of them and can direct their teammates accordingly — and verbally.

“For us, that’s not possible, that’s not realistic,” Andrews says.

The process is more about inherent understanding and movement as a team. If a forward pushes high to chase a ball, everyone behind her must follow. Halftime or injury breaks become more important, Andrews says, because they represent rare opportunities to look at each other as a group.

One guy, at the bginning of class, wondered the same question. How does that work? I said, “You should read the story. It gets explained about 20 percent the way through the story, and it’s a good one, and you’d like it if you read it.”

He just smiled an embarrassed smile and put his head down for a while. We carried on.

We also read and discussed this story, How the Texans and a spa enabled Deshaun Watson’s troubling behavior, mostly for the troubling headline, so I could make some important points about headlines. But the copy is worth reading, too, if you can stomach it.

The accusations have been frequent and startling: more than two dozen women have said the football star Deshaun Watson harassed or assaulted them during massage appointments that Watson and his lawyers insist were innocuous.

Two grand juries in Texas this year declined to charge him criminally and, while the N.F.L. considers whether to discipline him, he has gotten another job, signing a five-year, $230 million fully guaranteed contract to play quarterback for the Cleveland Browns this coming season.

It is time, Watson and his representatives say, for everyone to move on.

Yet a New York Times examination of records, including depositions and evidence for the civil lawsuits as well as interviews of some of the women, showed that Watson engaged in more questionable behavior than previously known.

The Times’s review also showed that Watson’s conduct was enabled, knowingly or not, by the team he played for at the time, the Houston Texans, which provided the venue Watson used for some of the appointments. A team representative also furnished him with a nondisclosure agreement after a woman who is now suing him threatened online to expose his behavior.

In org comm we talked about crisis and conflict. Specifically, what are the differences between crises and scandals. This is one of those classes where you get to use popular instances of players the class knows and try to understand why things transpired as they did. For us, it is all building to next week’s work. And toward the final, but they don’t know that yet.