A SOUTHERN FRIED EDUCATION traces the education of a Southern man from the first grade through both graduate school and law school. The road is somewhat treacherous, but in traveling it, author Mark Hickson III envisions several principles that will help others avoid making the same mistakes he made-mistakes involving the system of spankings in the 1950s, science laboratory courses in high school and college, thesis writing, and arguing with law professors. Some of the principles Hickson has learned include the following: * Never embarrass a teacher in class. * Never post grades near your office. * Teachers and students can be friends. * Don't tutor colleagues in graduate school. * A good teacher never destroys a student's dreams. * The most important thing to know is when to say nothing. More important than the principles in each story is the way in which every small trail leads to a new discovery-a new principle-about school and life. relationships are more valuable than the content of a course, the short stories in A SOUTHERN FRIED EDUCATION display a wealth of wisdom about life, culture, and those things that can only be learned through time.

This book addresses questions about the major impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on human communication and the ways in which the communication discipline has been impacted by and has responded to the conditions of the pandemic. Contributors examine both the personal and the university administrative level to discuss how the pandemic and its lockdowns and transition to online learning, among other consequences, impacted specific areas of scholarship within the communication discipline. Contributors represent a number of sub-disciplines and focus on important elements they have witnessed being influenced by pandemic responses, bringing to light the unique insights about the pandemic and its effect on human communication their sub-discipline affords them. They go on to explore how the pandemic has impacted, or will impact, the teaching of their subject area and provide future suggestions for research in that area. Sub-disciplines represented include interpersonal communication, family communication, nonverbal communication, health communication, military learners, communication administrators, and instructional communication concerns.

The Political Blame Game in American Democracy looks at the forces that have developed over the past fifty-plus years and created a dysfunctional political system in the United States. It argues that the current level of partisan polarization is actually the culmination of a number of forces at work during the past few decades. These include a perception by each party that the other is using unfair political tactics; the subsequent creation of a culture of blame, with each party blaming the other for the dysfunction; a decline in political norms, leading to childlike behavior by politicians and political candidates; and a culture of payback in which the opposition argues that their opponents are responsible for the decline. These four factors culminated in the 2016 presidential campaign, where they were exemplified by Donald Trump, and have continued to have a significant ongoing impact on the political landscape of the United States.