Essays: March 2004 Archive Page

I look at my students: some barefoot, others wearing hats and dressed in clothes they could easily have slept in, and I think how the college classroom has become an adjunct of the dorm bedchamber. Sometimes, when I begin classes, I get the impression that the students resent my interrupting their conversations. Few of them take notes, and I unconsciously make an effort to be more entertaining.... Today's tenure process, particularly the requirement that one get high scores on student evaluations, makes it extraordinarily hard to demand as much from students and to use the fear of disapproval as a motivation. It's hard to deny there is a direct correlation between high scores on student evaluations, grade inflation, and the relaxation of standards. | From the perspective of more than a decade, I can see how much I learned from the old lions, but, if they had been required to hand out student evaluations, my younger self would have punished them with the lowest possible scores.--"Thomas H. Benton" --Remembering the Old Lions (Chronicle)

Too often, writers workshop their egos, instead. It's human nature, especially if your story is on the table and everyone's talking about it. But to get the most out of a writer's workshop, you need to think of the story on the table as your car, and everyone around the table is a mechanic looking under the hood. If you want to learn how to fix it -- or just soup it up -- on your own, you have to watch and listen. And get your hands dirty. --Mike Arnzen --Working the Workshop (Gorelets)

He was the greatest director of his generation. Jack Nicholson's "Here's Johnny!" Lolita's heart-shaped sunglasses. The Dr Strangelove cowboy riding the nuclear bomb like it's a bucking bronco. And on and on. So many images have implanted themselves into the public consciousness, surely because of the director's ever-burgeoning attention to detail.

"Why don't you just accept," says Jan, "that this was how he worked?"

"But if he hadn't allowed his tireless work ethic to take him to unproductive places, he'd have made more films," I say. "For instance, the Space 1999 lawsuit seems, with the benefit of hindsight, a little trivial." --Jon Ronson --Citizen Kubrick  (Guardian Unlimited)

It is still dark when I get up, the suitcase carefully packed the day before. I will be away almost a month, the preparations have been exstensive, at work and home. The little plane takes off, and carries me into dawn.
--Transit - but going where? (Thinking with My Fingers)