Recently in the Essays Category

http://www.60secondrecap.com/resource/

How to Write a Paper

• 1: Get Psyched
• 2: The Thesis Statement
• 3: Organization
• 4: Proving you know what you're talking about
• 5: Your teacher is not a mind-reader
• 6: In Conclusion
• 7: Rah-rah-rah, etc.

I just drafted a new handout on writing editorials. I couldn't find anything online pitched at the proper level, so I had to write it myself. (I'll probably be able to use a version of this in my freshman comp class too.)

Presume that your opponent has good reasons for disagreeing with you. Talk to people on the other side, and include some of their eloquent, well-argued points. Carefully and respectfully explain why your position is nevertheless more accurate (or ethical, or practical, or inspirational, or whatever).

• Avoid trying to make your opinion seem stronger by distorting the other side, either through exaggeration ("Animal rights groups would rather millions of people from cancer than have one animal die during a scientific experiment") or by using unflattering labels ("nicotine addicts who oppose my right to breathe fresh air..." "reactionary tea-baggers whose pathetic world-view is threatened by Obama's heroic economic vision..." ).
• Making "the other side" look evil or stupid may fool people who don't know what you are talking about, but people who do know something about the subject can (and will) write a letter to the editor correcting your misrepresentations.

The Seton Hill registrar describes how her devotion to mathematics and logic has helped her serve her community.

"Nearly everything I need to know, and that I currently believe, I think I've learned at school board meetings.... I've survived seven elections, I've been beaten up by the press, made deep friendships and bitter enemies. I've been threatened, accused, betrayed, but most of all rewarded." Barbara Hinkle (8.4Mb MP3)

I'm keeping my media skills limber, posting pictures and audio that I took during Seton Hill University's discussion of This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women.

From the president's prepared remarks to school children, scheduled for tomorrow.

Every single one of you has something you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That's the opportunity an education can provide. 

Maybe you could be a good writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor - maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine - but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life - I guarantee that you'll need an education to do it. --Barack Obama, whitehouse.gov

Interesting that Obama mentions "articles in a newspaper," rather than "articles for a news website" or "articles for a RSS feed" or "articles for cranially-implanted holographic simulation networks."  But he does end with a reference to social networking.

Do you think the hand-washing reference is just a little bit... I don't know... pandering?  Is the President going out of his way to make Republicans look silly for opposing some Oval Office happytalk? 

A teenager who posted a death threat on Facebook, yesterday became the first person in Britain to be jailed for bullying on a social networking site. Keeley Houghton, 18, said she would kill Emily Moore, whom she had bullied for four years since they were at school together. --Daily Mail

Many specific things come to mind when I ponder writing a 200 word paragraph on my identity as a writer. First of all, when I think of producing that many words about my writing identity, I think of my ability to start immediately writing, using the first thing that pops into my head, since the word count is so important.  A second tip for producing the required number of words on my identity as a writer is to repeat the assigned writing topic as many times as possible. But most of all, I think of how useful it is to begin with a couple of unrelated points about my identity as a writer, and then bring in a random third point, unrelated to the first two, and by calling it my "most important," giving the impression that I am building towards a conclusion. Finally, after repeating my points about starting with the first thing that pops into my head, frequently repeating the assigned topic, and picking a random point to call the "most important," I can squeeze out more words by summarizing what I've written. Therefore, I hope these 200 words convey a specific point about who I am as a writer.

Interesting pair of essays in The Chronicle Review. I may use this in my journalism class for a unit on statistics, advocacy, and the importance of open-minded skepticism in the reporting of the news.

Christina Hoff Sommers, in her essay "Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship" (The Chronicle Review, online edition, June 29), criticized Nancy K.D. Lemon, a lecturer in domestic-violence law at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Law, for publishing errors in the popular textbook she edits, Domestic Violence Law, and for not taking seriously her continuing criticisms of the book. "One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack," Sommers charged. Following is Lemon's response to those criticisms and Sommers's rebuttal. Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

TV news emphasizes the immediate and the emotional.  This screen shot shows how the NBC news affiliate in Miami allows readers to rate stories by emotions.

Notice that this mechanism does not reward stories for being fair, informative, accurate, or even newsworthy. 

I stumbled across this feature while reading a story about the 11-year-old reporter who got a one-on-one interview with the president. Miami is apparently "bored" with that story, though the city is "laughing" about stories on Cuba running out of toilet paper, an elderly couple starting a fire while doing the nasty in bed (illustrated by the image of a sexy young couple in bed, since apparently no sexy hidden camera footage of the newsmaking and whoopee-making elderly couple was available), and a man who pretended to be disabled so a hired nurse would change his dirty diapers.

[The] story is told of a music critic who was sent to a concert hall in Chicago to review a performance. When he found the hall burning down, he went home and went to bed. In the morning he explained, "There was no story. The concert hall burned down."

I trust these stories are apocryphal, but they serve to illustrate the difficulty of defining news.

There is some truth in the statement that good news is not news. Good news is the stuff of life. It is what happens to most of us most of the time. We survive. We prosper.

But if happiness was all we had to read about, we'd be very bored indeed. -- Jack Smith, LA Times (1987)

David Stanley pointed me to this thoughtful essay.

Modern librarians who prioritize information over knowledge perpetuate a distraction from the real purpose of a library. A library facilitates the patient gathering of knowledge - whose acquisition is superior to almost every other endeavor. Religions have adapted to technology for the most part without being destroyed by it, so why can't libraries? It might not be too late.

Information on the Internet may come across as authoritative, but much of it is one giant Ponzi scheme, especially in the hands of the young, where it can become a counterfeit for the reading and memorization that true learning requires. Scholars are made through the quiet study of one chapter at a time. For that we need silence. We need to restore an appreciation for the close study of words.--William H. Wisner, Christian Science Monitor

Sore throat. Sinus pressure. Upset stomach. Exhaustion.

I'm sitting at home recovering from the flu, which I started to come down with during the Computers & Writing Conference this weekend. 

I had planned to attend Digital Humanities 2009 in Maryland, where I'm part of a group that's presenting tomorrow.  The group will survive without me as I try to recover.  If I feel well enough to drive tomorrow, I might try to catch the middle of the conference.

The week before, I took a train from Greensburg (near Pittsburgh) to Philadelphia, then a commuter train to a town in New Jersey for my nephew's baptism.  I was proud to learn I still have the touch -- the baby went to sleep in my arms.

During the same Mass, there was another family there for their own baptism.  Someone from that family was strutting all over the place with his video camera, completely oblivious to the fact that a religious service was going on (he could have been a bit more respectful), and that another family was also trying to take pictures of the same event.   I didn't feel like disrupting the service further by joining a media scrum, so I missed some shots, but I did discretely move so that I could get some (unobstructed) video clips during the actual sprinkling of water.

I've been thinking a lot about babies.

My own kids (Peter is 11 and Carolyn is 7) are talkative and rambunctious.  Our parenting philosophy has never equated "good child" with "quiet child."  So I'm probably immune to a certain level of squawking that might upset the average person.

On the ride up, we sat in the row behind a baby who looked about 12-14 months.

This is not a story about how annoying it is to travel near a cranky baby.  I didn't mind at all that the baby in the row in front of me drooled happily in my face and threw toys into my lap.  And, in fact, when an older couple (who could have chosen a seat elsewhere on the train) started complaining very loudly about the baby, I turned around and said "Do you know what really bothers me on trains?  Traveling near adults who complain too loudly." (I resisted the urge to say "old people who complain too loudly."  But they moved seats shortly after that.)

Anyone who's been around a baby knows that the noises a happy baby makes are far preferable to the noises an unhappy baby makes, so I was very happy when my own kids started playing with the baby.  My kids delighted in sending the toys back over the divider and singing songs for the baby.  (They did their fair share of whining over the course of 6 or 8 hours, too, but the baby kept them well occupied.)

What was really, really sad is that for hours at a time, this baby's mother sat with her laptop open, chatting in some kind of RPG, checking Facebook, and later putting in a movie for herself.. 

Near the beginning of the ride, we exchanged perfunctory greetings with all our neighbors, which established the creation of a temporary community.  At one point, a young man across the aisle helped my kids count to 20 in Spanish.  Later, when this same fellow started swearing casually into his cell phone, I tapped him on the shoulder and avuncularly reminded him of the presence of children on the train.  (His face registered dismay, and as he got off the train later, he put his hand on my shoulder and apologized sincerely.)

Not once during this train ride did the mother engage with my kids, despite the fact that my kids were amusing her kid for hours. She didn't take the baby away from them (to signal she wanted them to back off), or teach my kids games that the baby likes, or ask me about my kids, or join in the fun.  She seemed perfectly content to leave the baby-minding task to my kids, so that she could concentrate on her computer.

While I didn't like the feeling that I had become the moral enforcer of our corner of the train, I know that my own kids needed some boundaries.. Let the baby touch you, I told them, but don't grab the baby.  Don't startle the baby with loud noises.  Don't let the baby give you his bottle or snacks -- tell him to put them in his own mouth, and praise him for it. 

At one point, I had to take a hard toy away from the baby and give him a soft toy because he was swinging it around near my face.

At another point, the baby had clambered up onto the arm of his seat, pounding against the window, his center of gravity up pretty close to the seat back.  We went over a bump, the baby wobbled, and I lurched forward to catch him. The mother thanked me, and said something like "I was just getting something from my bag," as if to explain her inattentiveness.  But in truth, she had been just as preoccupied by her computer for hours.
 
Every so often the baby would let out a shriek.  Another passenger must have scowled at the mother, because I heard her say, rather helplessly, "I don't know why he's doing that."

I knew why her baby was doing that.  It was because my own kids were making faces at him, making his toys dance for him, and playing peek-a-boo with him. For hours. 

What could she have been writing on her Facebook page, that was more important than turning her head to see why her baby was shrieking for joy?

Still, the creative-writing program, unsystematic or even anti-system as it might believe itself to be, is a system. People go in at one end and they come out the other, bearing (like the Scarecrow) a piece of paper with a Latin inscription, but also bearing (unlike the Scarecrow) the impress of an institutional experience. The nature of that experience mutates as the folk wisdom of the workshop mutates--from "Show, don't tell," which was the mantra in the nineteen-forties and fifties, to the effectively opposite mantra "Find your voice," which took over in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. McGurl suggests that these mantras encode shifting patterns of cultural assumptions--about identity, about work, about gender and class, and, of course, about what counts as good writing--and that they have had a big effect on the stories and novels that American writers have produced. "The rise of the creative-writing program," he says, "stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history." -- Louis Menand, The New Yorker

Read to the end -- Menand is being professionally skeptical throughout the essay, but he admits in the end that learning to write poems is a process that brings its own benefits, whether or not they include publishing poetry.

If you're a fan of lifehacking, you'll already be familiar with some of these issues. I'm blogging this because it's a good example of doing justice to an opposing view, giving a good presentation of the strongest objections to multitasking. 

If the pundits clogging my RSS reader can be trusted (the ones I check up on occasionally when I don't have any new e-mail), our attention crisis is already chewing its hyperactive way through the very foundations of Western civilization. Google is making us stupid, multitasking is draining our souls, and the "dumbest generation" is leading us into a "dark age" of bookless "power browsing." Adopting the Internet as the hub of our work, play, and commerce has been the intellectual equivalent of adopting corn syrup as the center of our national diet, and we've all become mentally obese. Formerly well-rounded adults are forced to MacGyver worldviews out of telegraphic blog posts, bits of YouTube videos, and the first nine words of Times editorials. Schoolkids spread their attention across 30 different programs at once and interact with each other mainly as sweatless avatars. (One recent study found that American teenagers spend an average of 6.5 hours a day focused on the electronic world, which strikes me as a little low; in South Korea, the most wired nation on earth, young adults have actually died from exhaustion after multiday online-gaming marathons.) We are, in short, terminally distracted. And distracted, the alarmists will remind you, was once a synonym for insane. (Shakespeare: "poverty hath distracted her.")

This doomsaying strikes me as silly for two reasons. First, conservative social critics have been blowing the apocalyptic bugle at every large-scale tech-driven social change since Socrates' famous complaint about the memory-destroying properties of that newfangled technology called "writing." (A complaint we remember, not incidentally, because it was written down.) And, more practically, the virtual horse has already left the digital barn. It's too late to just retreat to a quieter time. Our jobs depend on connectivity. Our pleasure-cycles--no trivial matter--are increasingly tied to it. Information rains down faster and thicker every day, and there are plenty of non-moronic reasons for it to do so. The question, now, is how successfully we can adapt. -- Sam Anderson

This essay clearly identifies a thesis, in the paragraphs I've quoted above. But then it spends a long section arguing precisely the opposite of the thesis.

My freshmen are often so used to getting their academic information through bulleted lists and bold keywords, so that they skim for the main ideas and only read the connecting text if they can't instantly get the gist of the page.  But the traditional essay requires readers to pay attention to a chain of ideas, leading from an opening question, through all the potential objections, to a conclsuion. Students who aren't familiar with this structure will often quote from the "con" part of an essay, mistakenly attributing to author A an idea that author A has cited only in order to tear it town.

I remember, as a high school sophomore, that some of my classmates were horrified by "A Modest Proposal," because they read it at the surface level, and didn't grasp the irony. (They also apparently didn't read the introductory summary or the discussion questions, but that's another issue.)

High-end journalism can and should bite any hand that tries to feed it, and it should bite a government hand most viciously. Moreover, it is the right of every American to despise his local newspaper - for being too liberal or too conservative, for covering X and not covering Y, for spelling your name wrong when you do something notable and spelling it correctly when you are seen as dishonorable. And it is the birthright of every healthy newspaper to hold itself indifferent to such constant disdain and be nonetheless read by all. Because in the end, despite all flaws, there is no better model for a comprehensive and independent review of society than a modern newspaper. As love-hate relationships go, this is a pretty intricate one. An exchange of public money would pull both sides from their comfort zone and prove unacceptable to all.

But a non-profit model intrigues, especially if that model allows for locally-based ownership and control of news organizations. Anything that government can do in the way of creating non-profit status for newspapers should be seriously pursued.-- David Simon, Hearing on the Future of Journalism, US Senate

It's the first time I've given a final exam in a while. I usually mark final projects or final papers, which I've seen in numerous draft forms for the past month, so all I really need to do is read the student's final reflection, after all the hard work is over. But in a large-ish literature class (large by Seton Hill standards -- about 30), I gave a final exam in order to assess student familiarity with the works on the syllabus. I've already marked the identification questions and the short answer questions, but my brain has hit a brick wall as I mark the long essay questions.  So I hit the internet for a web surfing break, and found I solace in knowing I am not alone.

I was chatting to a business teacher who showed me a test generating program for business. He clicks a few categories - chapters and concepts covered, number of questions desired - and hits a button. The multiple choice test instantly appears on his screen. He hits print, and his test is written. He will photocopy it and give it to his students along with a form that the students use to select their choice of answer. He will turn in those forms to an exam office that will scan the form and give him a print out of student marks. His time on task? About two minutes.

I on the other hand will take two hours to write a test that is tailored to what I taught in English, and then spend about twenty to thirty hours marking it.  -- Steve Wise

I presume Steve wrote it, since it's in the first person and there's a photo of a man on the page. But the blog is credited to Steve and Pam Wise.

I still have revised final papers to mark in three more classes, but since I've seen drafts of all those papers before, the marking should go fairly quickly.

Once more unto the breech, dear friends, once more...

This article from NCTE comes at a good time for me, since I'm scheduled to teach a "Writing about Literature" class in the fall. It's a PDF (booo!).

Of all types of writing, writing about literature may seem the least practical. Who apart from scholars and English majors analyzes poetry after the age of 18? Even book reviewers don't write the kinds of essays commonly assigned in school. Why do teachers devote so much effort to developing an arcane skill? Because writing about literature disciplines the mind. It challenges students to look closely into what they read and express clearly and powerfully what they find there. Meeting this challenge entails more than identifying correct answers to teachers' questions. It requires deep reading and analytical thinking--skills that will serve students well whatever their futures may hold. -- Carol Jago (136k PDF)

No comment. Just watch it. Two minutes well-spent. Via Kairosnews.

• Nate Krueter, "High Stakes Style"
• Star Medzerian, "Rereading the Past: Style's Place in Our Disciplinary Memory"
• Mike Duncan, "Destroying the Topic Sentence"
• William Fitzgerald, "Dressing Up in Style: The Return of the Figurative in Composition Pedagogy"

This was one of the most enjoyable 4Cs panels I've attended, mostly because it reminded me that I got into this major because I love words.

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited, with my own comments in square brackets.

• Michael Williamson, "Validity and Bias in Writing Assessment"
• Les Perelman, "The Five Paragraph Essay Makes People Stupid and Machines Smart"
• Brian Huot: "How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the 5-Paragraph Essay"
• Nancy Glaser, "One of Many Myths: Does the Five-Paragraph Essay Sink or Swim in Large-Scale Writing Assessments."
• Edward White, Respondent. (White recently published an amusing "satire" of a five-paragraph essay, which appeared in College Composition and Communication 59:3 (Feb 2008): 524-526

Another chapter in the love-hate relationship comp teachers have with formulaic assessments. (Mostly hate, with some codependency issues.)

[My own thoughts will appear in brackets. I regularly assign Rose's essay, "I Just Wanna be Average" to my freshman writing students. He considers the editorial a valuable form of public writing, and teaches graduate classes that ask students to use their specialized subject knowledge to produce editorials of value to the broader community.]

Bringing our knowledge into the public sphere. Disciplinary knowledge, teaching and classrooms, and personal knowledge.  As a group we are oriented toward practice. This talk is an opportunity to discuss going public with what we know.

[Rose's talk was very structured... so structured that I fear I may have missed labeling a section or two, either because I was inspired by something he had just said and was writing rather than listening, or because I was listening so closely that I forgot to take notes.]

News about a free-speech dust-up in the department where I used to work at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire:

This fall, the English department, the publication's then "administrative home," voted unanimously to sever its ties to Flip Side, citing, in a statement, interest in "fostering the responsible use of free speech and the mutually respectful community envisioned by the university's Centennial Plan." The move left Flip Side in a precarious position in terms of renewing its university funding until Monday, when a new adviser - a geology professor - stepped in.

"That very controversial article that was in the Flip Side, it definitely led to conversations and very strong debate on this campus," said Kent M. Syverson, the new adviser. "I look at that article and it was juvenile, it was profane, I'm offended by it. I wish he would keep his sexual fantasies to himself, quite frankly, because I'm kind of old school that way. But then when the English department pulls their support for Flip Side because they want Flip Side to exercise 'responsible use of free speech'.... What responsible use of free speech means to them, and to most people, is 'You're going to say what I agree with.' And I don't think that's a very good model for the modern public university." -- Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed

Prof. Syverson claims that the phrase "responsible use of free speech" actually means "You're going to say what I agree with," implying that the Eau Claire English department censored "The Flip Side" by withdrawing its endorsement.

Let's imagine that some eager undergraduates announce an edgy, new, rough-and-tumble publication devoted to geology.  Imagine that, for several years, it proudly publishes everything from Vernian hollow-earth conspiracy fantasies to geocentric Creationist sermons, celebrating them all as "science," even as the contributors frequently parade their ignorance of and contempt for scientific principles.

Now imagine that Prof. Syverson and his colleagues in the geology department decide this publication falls so far short of its professional standards that its members no longer wish to associate themselves with it. Does this judgment suppress anyone's First Amendment rights?
 
When I was on the Eau-Claire English faculty (1998-2003), sponsoring a student group was one of many possible ways to fulfill the "service" requirement of our contracts.  From what I have seen of "The Flip Side," I can imagine why every single English professor might want to fill in the "service" column with something other than voluntary association with this particular publication.  

"The Flip Side" failed to earn the patronage of every member of a department with explicit training in the evaluation of written texts.  But their professional judgment of "The Flip Side" is not censorship. 

It's a real stretch to latch onto this issue in order to defend the First Amendment.   We cheapen the Bill of Rights if we treat it as a magic power-up pill that shields us from social responsibility. 

Some great writing and insightful observations in this review.

The story's arc is like that of a football thrown lazily against a crisp autumn sky: Even a dog can figure out where it's going to land. Hell, I could accurately predict individual lines of the game's dialogue. I'm not saying the narrative in Gears of War 2 was bad; I'm saying it was -- with a few, startling exceptions -- completely mediocre.

And yet here's the even crazier thing: I think the weak story made the game better.

Normally, we assume that shoot'em-up games need a good story to help you "care about the gameplay." Because shooters are extremely similar to each other in terms of mechanics -- kill things, scrounge for ammo, go kill more things -- they require a strong narrative to give the action some emotional payload.

We often say the same thing about role-playing games and other genres. The play is so generally similar from title to title -- complete quests, level up, complete harder quests -- that it is only the quality of the narratives that pulls you along. No story, no incentive to get to the end. Right? The story and characters give the play meaning.

Except, for me, Gears of War 2 worked in precisely the opposite way. The gameplay is so insanely superb that it imbued the narrative with meaning. --Clive Thompson

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has released a major study that aims to establish benchmarks for assessing the humanities. Assessment was one of the major issues that arose during last year's English program review, so this is worth a view. Here's a quote from the press release:

"Until now the nation has lacked a broad-based, quantitative analysis of the status of the humanities in the United States," said Leslie Berlowitz, chief executive officer of the American Academy and project co-director. "We need more reliable empirical data about what is being taught in the humanities, how they are funded, the size of the workforce, and public attitudes toward the field. The Humanities Indicators are an important step in closing that fundamental knowledge gap. They will help researchers and policymakers, universities, foundations, museums, libraries, humanities councils and others answer basic questions about the humanities, track trends, diagnose problems, and formulate appropriate interventions."

I'm not sure I'm ready to dive into the raw data, but there are five interpretive essays that look like good entry points. 

• Part I:  Public Education and the Humanities by William J. Reese
• Part II:  Taking the Pulse of the Humanities: Higher Education in the Humanities Indicators Project by Roger L. Geiger
• Part III:  In Progress: The Idea of a Humanities Workforce by David Laurence
• Part IV:  Landscape of Humanities Research and Funding by Alan Brinkley
• Part V:  This American Life: How Are the Humanities Public? by Julie Ellison

I like to think of the cosmos as a theater, yet a theater cannot exist without an audience, to witness and to celebrate. Robot craft and mighty telescopes will continue to show us unimaginable wonders. But when humans return to the moon and put a base there and prepare to go to Mars and become true Martians, we--the audience--literally enter the cosmic theater. Will we finally reach the stars? -- Ray Bradbury, National Geographic

Camille Paglia puts her finger on something that has vaguely troubled me.  For years I've enjoyed reading Language Log's posts on Bushisms -- which as often as not included the reminder that we all garble our syntax from time to time, and even daringly suggests that Obama makes his own share of gaffes. Remember the gratuitous Nancy Reagan joke? (Of course, that's not nearly as bad as Reagan's "We begin bombing in five minutes." But I digress.)

Paglia targets Dick Cavett's Nov 14 NYT blog on Sara Palin,"The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla,"  calling it

...insufferably supercilious. With dripping disdain, he sniffed at her "frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences." He called her "the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High," "one who seems to have no first language." I will pass over Cavett's sniggering dismissal of "soccer moms" as lightweights who should stay far, far away from government.

I was so outraged when I read Cavett's column that I felt like taking to the air like a Valkyrie and dropping on him at his ocean retreat in Montauk in the chichi Hamptons. How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?

Paglia then recounts an anecdote about a talented and popular Yale professor who used class time to make a sneering, classist, sexist statement about a marriage between a well-heeled socialite and an italian-American mechanic.

Yes, that is the lordly Yale that formed Dick Cavett's linguistic and cultural assumptions and that has alarmingly resurfaced in the contempt that he showed for the self-made Sarah Palin in "The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla." I am very sorry that he, and so many other members of the educational elite, cannot take pleasure as I do in the quick, sometimes jagged, but always exuberant way that Palin speaks -- which is closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class.

English has evolved, and the world has moved on. There is no necessary connection between bourgeois syntax and practical achievement. I have never had the slightest problem with understanding Sarah Palin's meaning at any time. Since when do free Americans subscribe to a stuffy British code of veddy, veddy proper English? We don't live in a stultified class system. In the U.K., in fact, many literary leftists make a big, obnoxious point about retaining their working-class accents. Too many American liberals claim to be defenders of the working class and then run like squealing mice from working-class manners and mores (including moose hunting and wolf control). What smirky, sheltered hypocrites. Get the broom! -- Camille Paglia, Salon

If I were still teaching Seminar in Thinking and Writing (which has units on topics such as education, race, class, and gender), I'd definitly assign Paglia, since she works so very hard [edited to insert the following word] not to fall into the kind of intellectual rut that leads students to try to turn a bumper sticker slogan into a five-paragraph essay.

A new generation of wired politicos will give journalists much fodder for scandal, but isn't this making it a bit too easy for them?

Incoming Obama administration director of speechwriting Jon Favreau (L) and a friend pose with a cardboard cutout of incoming Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a party. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

Question No. 63 asks that applicants "please provide any other information ... that could ... be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect."

For a while there this afternoon, President-elect Barack Obama's immensely talented chief speechwriter, 27-year-old Jon Favreau, might have been pondering how to address that question.

That's when some interesting photos of a recent party he attended -- including one where he's dancing with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of secretary of state-designate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and another where he's placed his hand on the cardboard former first lady's chest while a friend is offering her lips a beer -- popped up on Facebook for about two hours. The photos were quickly taken down -- along with every other photo Favreau had of himself on the popular social networking site, save for one profile headshot. --Washington Post

Editing, like sending thank-you cards, is one of those things that everyone acknowledges is a good idea but few people do. It takes time and you don't reap much reward, certainly not equivalent to the time. There is probably not enough attention to teaching writing in graduate school, but at least you have plenty of models and plenty of chances to practice.

Models of editing are scarce -- that is, unless you work with commercial presses or magazines. There, editors really edit. We think of those venues as shallow slaves to the market, but they often pay more attention to the words and ideas than we do. They never lose sight of their audience, holding the quaint assumption that writing is actually written for people -- not for tenure or a CV, both of whom are tone-deaf. -- Jeffrey J. Williams, Chronicle

Stark, unadorned writing. No melodramatic flourishes or sentiment. Just the truth. Powerful.

Fewer than 100 survived Treblinka. I am the last one. The will to live is stronger than anything else; I never gave up. Maybe I'm meant to be alive to tell the story. This is the last generation to hear first-hand from survivors. In 10 years, there won't be any of us left. People should know what happened to us. -- Eddie Weinstein

A researcher who studies World of Warcraft likens leading in-game raiding parties to teaching a class.

Raiding has taught me that being a good teacher requires laying down strict guidelines while simultaneously demonstrating real care for your students. The stronger the ties of trust and respect between teacher and student, the more weight they will bear. In the past I've cringed when my raid leaders cheerfully announced that we would spend the next four hours dying over, and over, and over again to a boss who seemed impossible to defeat. But I've trusted them, done my job, and ultimately we have triumphed because they insisted on perseverance. The visiting raid leader who took us through the Kael raid lacked that history with us -- he was too much of a stranger to ask us to dig deep and give big.

A willingness to take risks can also be shored up by commitment and drive. Our guest leader drove my guildies nuts, but impressed me with his professionalism. Does this mean that after graduate school even generous doses of sadism seem unremarkable? Perhaps. But it also indicates that I was willing to work hard to see Kael dead, even if it meant catching some flack. For them, it was a game, and when it stopped being fun they lost interest.

What I learned that night was that I believe in the power of fear and humiliation as teaching methods. Obviously, I don't think they are teaching methods that should be used often, or be at the heart of our pedagogy. But I do think that there are occasions when it is appropriate to let people know that there is no safety net. There are times -- not all the time, or most of the time, but occasionally and inevitably -- when you have to tell people to shut up and do their job. I'm not happy to discover that I believe this, and in some ways I wish I didn't. But Warcraft has taught me that I there is a place for "sink or swim" methods in teaching. (Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed)

The headline immediately caught my attention.  I went to Catholic high school, and while most of my teachers were laypeople (that is, not nuns or priests), my freshman year I had an octogenarian Latin teacher (a priest) who would threaten to throw erasers at us -- but always with a twinkle in his eye.  He was actually very patient and charming, but he used the eraser threat as if he were parodying the stereotype of a strict teacher. 

My Algebra II / Trigonometry teacher was not a parody, she was serious. Usually, the only praise she ever gave was moving on to the next student after you'd survived your grilling. After a quiz, she would say "Everyone who got an A, bring your paper up.  Now everyone who got a B, bring your paper up.  Now, all the rest of you."  That was a sort of reverse humiliation, since the rest of us saw that someone was able to earn an A. She called us "Sir Jerz" or "Lady Ryan," which I suppose was vaguely appropriate, since our mascot was a knight, but I'm sure her goal was to take us down a peg or two and remind us who was really in charge.  If we answered her question with a "yes," she'd say "Yes, what?" And we'd say, "Yes, sister." 

I've had plenty of other teachers who were more personable, and made me feel happier while I was in the classroom, but she really stands out in my memory. But boy, she really made me want to study.

http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

I'd like to be able to link to specific details on the map, but I don't think it's possible.

I'd never heard of the "Argument Slide" before.  The "concept visualization" cluster is probably most useful for teaching my freshman writing students.  I'm taking a quick break from marking midterms, and I only glanced at this. Filing it for later. (Via Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, where Lisa Spiro also introduces me to the term "slow blogging").