According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males. —Roger Dobson and Abul Taher —Cavegirls were first blondes to have fun (Times Online) The authors conclude by stating,…
Judith Moran, director of the Math Center at Trinity College in Connecticut, “started life,” she said, as an art major. Now, like several of the faculty members questioned, Moran said she wants all students to be able to assess numbers in The New York Times. Trinity students also get their quantitative feet held to the…
The freeform world of both the Jazz Age and the DotCom explosion create surreal intoxicated hilarity, and both The Great Gatsby and The Sims allow the participants to immerse themselves in the experience. Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, affords us some distance from this world and critical insight into the excesses of this…
Student Reaction to Google Placement (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) While preparing for my Intro to Literary Study class, I thought that, since I introduced the “Claim, Data, Warrant” concept last week when I was very sick, I’d better revisit the topic to make sure the presentation was effective. I Googled claim data warrant (without quotation marks) and…
My Half-Life 2 Mod Begins (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’ve finally knuckled down and started making a serious effort to teach myself how to create a Half-Life 2 mod. A “mod” is a user-created expansion to a commercial game. Perhaps the most famous of these is Day of Defeat, a total-conversion mod that turned Half-Life (a sci-fi…
—Ex 1-4c: A Clever Blank-Verse Entry on Your Blog (Intro to Literary Study (EL150)) I know they’re only doing it because I’ve made them; still, it thrills me every time My students write in blank verse on their blogs.
With a few clicks of a mouse, Pleasants can navigate the Web site for Goochland County’s Byrd Elementary School and access the Web log kept by her daughter’s third-grade teacher, Ellen Robinson. As all Goochland teachers have been required to do this year, Robinson keeps a school district-sponsored Web log, or blog — a kind…
Dr. Jerz, Hello, this is Jenna O’Brocto. I am currently student teaching at Southmoreland High School, and I am responsible for teaching two journalism classes. I was very apprehensive about this assignment, since I have only taken one journalism course, but I wanted to commend you on the amount of information I was able to…
In the 15 plays classified as tragedies, there are 13 definite and 8 possible suicides, ie, a total of 21 incidents for evaluation. Among the 13 overt suicides, at least 7 are depicted as being admirable under the circumstances at the time. Also, in various ways, 4 of these 13 were assisted, and at least…
Lecturing is So Much Easier than Leading a Discussion (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m still shuffling along with a virus (or whatever it is that’s laying me low). I trudged into the classroom and plopped into a chair in the front of the room, which felt very unnatural to me, since I like moving around during class.…
Although Curious George and Brokeback Mountain share many similarities, they also share many differences. Both involve men in hats, but the meaning of the hat changes. —Men in Hats, or, I’m Glad I Don’t Teach Composition Anymore ( Confessions of a Community College Dean)
Were I duplicitous and talented enough I could convince you I’m anything: a ninth grader with body image issues . . . a divorcee with nothing left to live for . . . or a graduate student about to hit the job market. This entire blog could be an elaborate scam designed to evoke undeserved…
“I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that this kind of behavior is naturally rewarded,” cautions Paul Argenti, professor of corporate communication at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. “But it does lead to success in some realms.” And those realms can include the legal profession, sales teams, trading floors, entrepreneurial endeavors — in other words, the…
Found Poetry Exercise: So Rich with Lines I Could Post (Seton Hill University — Home Page) I can’t remember when I first noticed it, but that’s a “Blog!” link on the SHU home page. I’m delighted to see the value of SHU blogging reflected in such a visible way. While the context suggests that the link…
The infection that’s been toying with me for the last week has finally pounced. I’ve been idly surfing, looking for a lost CD, rearranging my bedcovers, and just sort of waiting to get tired so that I’ll fall alseep asleep. But what’s going through my head is the delightful sight of my students counting off…
[E]ach time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him…
But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold – a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going…
One might imagine what would have happened to the future of the essay if Rousseau had contemplated and feared negative public response to his love of self-pleasure and resisted exploring his emotions in such a way (i.e., if he doubted whether self love would be a ?serious? topic). Or what if Cervantes took the ?novel?…
—Pick Up That Can (Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman) A comic strip using visuals created with the Half-Life 2 engine.
—So *this* is what we’re doing for Valentine’s Day? (CTRL+ALT_DEL) Okay, it’s a few days late, but it’s very sweet, in a geeky, retro way.