Recently in the Humanities 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.

A few of the many events scheduled in the Pittsburgh region.

"Of Faith and Kristallnacht," a panel discussion with keynote speaker Dr. Robert Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University; Sister Gemma del Duca, National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University; and the Rev. Don Green, executive director of Christian Associates of Southwestern Pennsylvania; among others. 7 p.m., Wednesday, The Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Monroeville (412-421-1500).

"The Use of Comic Books in Teaching the Holocaust," a lecture by Beverly Harris-Schenz of the University of Pittsburgh German Department, on teaching the Holocaust to German students. 8 p.m., Thursday, Jewish Community Center (412-421-1500).

"Brundibar," a children's opera originally performed by the children of Theresienstadt concentration camp, adapted by Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner, Opera Theater of Pittsburgh. Friday through next Sunday, CAPA Theater, Downtown (412-456-6666).

--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

What can be learned from Fitzgerald's tax returns? To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger--as if he were a grocer--a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition. No one could call Fitzgerald frugal, but he was always trying to save money--at least until his wife Zelda's illness, starting in 1929, put any idea of saving out of the question. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue. --William J. Quirk, The American Scholar

I assigned book one of Maus: A Survivor's Tale to a "Writing About Literature" class, the designated writing-intensive course for our English majors.

The students discussed the abrupt ending, the use of ethnic stereotypes, and of course the comic book medium itself. One student's "Hearing through Yiddish... Seeing in Ink..." is particularly thoughtful.

About a third of the class went on to read book two, even though it wasn't on the syllabus; one student read the book aloud to her nine-year-old sister.

This weekend, Seton Hill is home to a conference sponsored by the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education.  I'm canceling all my classes during one day of the conference.

I've asked students in my "Writing about Literature" class to write a book review, in order to establish a connection to the literary world outside the classroom.

The Purdue Online Writing Lab has a brief handout, Writing a Book Review, which begins by explaining the difference between a "book report" (written for the teacher who assigned it, by a student who is trying to prove he or she read an assigned text) and a "book review" (written for an interested reader who has not yet read the book, and who is in fact trying to decide whether to invest the time and money).

I remember reading about a professor who recently stopped offering a course in how to write book reviews, on the grounds that there was no longer a real market for people to become professional reviewers. The name of the professor escapes me...

Anyway, after a half hour of sifting through sites that are trying to sell custom book reports to lazy students, I found a few how-tos that looked valuable.  So here you go, internet hive mind, take these links and add them to your algorithm.

Note on Jargon and Genre

If you are familiar with the fan following of any work, you might be used to talking with other people who share your background knowledge of the genre. Rather than 1) using obscure genre-specific terms without any explanation, or 2) interrupting your essay frequent interruptions, so that your reader knows the difference between a k'tharn (a sword used by the Plains nomads in the realm of the Unknown Times, with a core of cursed blood taken from a clan enemy's heart) and a ba'tti'kak (kind of like a small k'tharn, only way awesomer), reduce your reliance on jargon. (If the jargon is especially well-handled, or especially confusing, it's worthwhile to note that in a section on its own.)

How to Write a Book Review (Bill Asenjo)

• Hook the reader with your opening sentence. Set the tone of the review. Be familiar with the guidelines -- some editors want plot summaries; others don't. Some want you to say outright if you recommend a book, but not others.
  
• Review the book you read -- not the book you wish the author had written.
  
• If this is the best book you have ever read, say so -- and why. If it's merely another nice book, say so.
  
• Include information about the author-- reputation, qualifications, etc. -- anything relevant to the book and the author's authority.

Book Reviews (Colorado State University)
A review is a critical essay, a report and an analysis. Whether favorable or unfavorable in its assessment, it should seem authoritative. The reviewer's competence must be convincing and satisfying. As with any form of writing, the writer of a book review is convincing through thorough study and understanding of the material, and opinions supported by sound reasoning. (See this document on reviewing nonfiction, poetry, and other types of books, including travel and children's)

Slashdot Book Review Guidelines
(These are written for the benefit of highly technical readers who know a lot about the subject but may not have much experience writing for a general readership.)

The style tips apply pretty well to any informative writing.) 

• Avoid cliches (this book, which is better than sliced bread, cuts through the clutter to break down to the nuts and bolts of the real brass tacks at the heart of the matter). Write plainly.
• Go easy on the exclamation marks and glib hyperbole ("This book belongs on every developer's desk!" sounds too much like "You're not going to pay a lot for this muffler!")
• Be cautious in general about suprelatives [sic] and strong adjectives. Don't say a book is "unsurpassed" or "the best available" on a given topic without doing some actual comparisons to likely contenders. Some other words of praise or derision are often used with too little backing evidence: rather than just calling a book "excellent," "sloppy," "boring," etc., provide concrete examples from the text that demonstrate these qualities.
• Watch your background. Even if each one is sensible by itself, too many adjectives in a sentence (or a review) makes it look like adjective soup. In particular, intensifiers like "very" and "extremely" in most cases can be excised to everyone's benefit.
• Rhetorical questions are fine in small doses, but not large ones. More than a few rhetorical questions in a review can make it sound breathless and silly.

Our students are transcendentalists, but they don't know it.

Speaking metaphorically, Thoreau writes "I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born."  Rather than treating children as wild creatures that needed to be tamed and civilized, Thoreau seesorder and meaning in nature, which is threatened, worn down, and buried by civilization.

At a time when being educated at Harvard meant reciting verbatim from establishment experts, Bronson Alcott in his Temple School taught through dialogue with his young pupils, asking them to express themselves by answering gently (but relentlessly) probing questions that nurtured their creative capacity, without shutting it down by training them to settle for answers. (Isn't that what we do in our seminars? Isn't that what part of the allure of being part of a small college, where you'll never be taught by a graduate student?)

I captured an example of Socratic dialogue a few weeks ago, when my 7-year-old daughter suddenly brought up free will and animism during an afternoon of birdhouse-building.  I didn't tell her what to think, I asked questions that encouraged her to think things through for herself.  (When she was six, she would sometimes stamp her foot and scream, "You can't punish me!  I haven't yet reached the age of reason!")

The last time I taught Thoreau's Walden, I noticed just how much time I was wasting matching my socks, so I bought a set of 12 identical black socks and a set of 12 identical white socks.  Presto change-o, I spend a lot less time sorting socks. 

I'm curious to find out what my students have to say about this book, since it's not a novel, or a biography. It's more than a collection of hastily composed, inter-connected and competing thoughts, but there's a level of spontaneity and emotional serendipity that might seem familiar to them.

This time around, I couldn't help but think of Mitch Maddox, who during the calendar year 2000 changed his name to DotComGuy, and retreated to a wired and webcammed home, where he lived the simple life cyberstyle, dispensing with all this tedious travel and engagement with the outdoors, and instead aiming to live by selling advertising space on his website, and ordering all that he needed online.  (Walter Kirn of Time wrote, "Like a switched-on Thoreau at a virtual Walden Pond, he devised the stunt to teach mankind that the age of e-commerce is here--and that it is good."  But the dot-com crash happened during the year 2000, and the bloom was off the cyber-rose by the time he finished his experiment in advertiser-supported and venture-capital-funded digital self-reliance.)

One last detail.  In 2004, Eric Eldred decided to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Walden by driving his Internet Bookmobile to Walden Pond Reservation and handing out free copies of the book.  A state park supervisor ordered him to stop because he hadn't requested a permit, on the grounds that his free copies would interfere with sales from the gift shop. (Boston Globe)

Wonderful stuff from Steven Krause.

Representing the world champion, the "going to hell in a hand-basket," the eternal the youth are getting worse and worse, and carrying on the tradition of complaining about students that dates back in western culture to at least Isocrates, I give you Stanley Fish's "What Should Colleges Teach?" on his New York Times "blog." Judging by the many comments here that repeat "oh yes, the students are so much worse today than they used to be," he's clearly the champ and the crowd favorite.  And why wouldn't he be?  Isn't it much more satisfying for grown-ups to note the weaknesses of youth?  After all, to do so simultaneously suggests that the grown-ups of today are both "better" than the current youth, and it suggests that the previous youth (e.g., today's grown-ups) were also better than the current youth ("When I was their age, we learned this stuff.  But now...").

In the challenger's corner, we have Clive Thompson and his WIRED article "The New Literacy," in which he argues that "it's not that today's students can't write.  It's that they're doing it in different places and in different ways."  Boos from the crowd; looks like Thompson has an uphill battle.  Let's see how this works out.

(Ding-ding-ding!)

I love the scare quotes for Fish's "blog".

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.

Within five years:

(1) Many online journals and magazines now only publishing traditional text-based fiction and poetry will, as part of their online offerings, publish digital literature on a regular basis;

(2) Most major universities and many colleges (if they don't already) will offer courses in New Media, and those courses will cover/include digital literature;

(3) Accomplished scholars who assess the whole of digital literature by examining exemplary models from early hypertexts will be saying "oops!" and seeking a vocabulary that accepts the continual flux and explosive change of current practices in digital literature;

[...]

--Alan Bigelow, Netpoetic

I'm teaching "Writing about Literature" this fall, so I should be up on the new changes in MLA format.  (Via the Reeves Library blog.)

I like some of the changes in MLA 2009, including labeling the source of a publication ("Web" or "Print" or "DVD" or the like) and standardizing italics instead of underlining (which has become strongly associated with web hyperlinks). 

I have mixed feelings about the de-emphasis of the URL, though, since it formulates the omission of information that could be very useful to future scholars. Here is how the Purdue OWL puts it:

No More URLs! While website entries will still include authors, article names, and website names, when available, MLA no longer requires URLs. Writers are, however, encouraged to provide a URL if the citation information does not lead readers to easily find the source. --Purdue OWL

URLs from databases, which generally end up crammed full of soon-to-expire session IDs and irrelevant search terms, are useless in a bibliography, so I won't miss them. 

But URLs of static pages can be very useful, particularly if the paper is submitted electronically.  The MLA is still very backwards when we compare our bibliographic procedures with the disciplines of math or engineering, which long ago standardized citation methods, so that whole bodies of papers can be slurped up into a database and the resulting data massaged endlessly.

There might be several different pages in a blog that contain the same information -- such as the blog home page, another page that shows entries from the last month, a category list that shows the last 20 entries, and the permalink. So, a scholar may "easily find the source" on the day he or she looks it up, but weeks or months or years later, that same page may only appear in the static date-based archives and in the permalink.

The gradual, and almost invisible, transformation of many "liberal arts colleges" to more comprehensive institutions is similar to another gradual trend that has reshaped the composition and the work of the American academic profession. Over the past three decades, colleges and universities have replaced tenure-track faculty positions with part-time and full-time term-contract positions -- a phenomenon Jack Shuster and Martin Finkelstein referred to as the "silent revolution" in their book The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). This piecemeal process at most institutions was not the result of a careful review of academic staffing needs or a systematic effort to improve the quality of instruction and scholarship. Nor was it the outcome of a national debate on the nature of the academic profession in the 21st century. -- Roger G. Baldwin, Inside Higher Ed

For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn't rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner.

How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition--including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead--evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence. According to Calvin, the reason we survived is that our brains changed to meet the challenge: we transformed the ability to target a moving animal with a thrown rock into a capability for foresight and long-term planning. In the process, we may have developed syntax and formal structure from our simple language. -- Jamais Cascio, The Atlantic

"What if I had a check on my desk for $5,000? And what if I rewarded the writer whose introduction most caught my attention, who most effectively made me want to continue because of a solid and clear thesis, with a check for five grand? Would your introductions improve even more?"

Cries of "Absolutely!" filled the room -- to which I replied, "Then you always could do it. You just couldn't be bothered."

Silence followed. -- Bob Kunzinger, Chronicle of Higher Education (paid subscription)

After working with students on their thesis, Kunzinger has his students write the introduction to their papers in class, and gives them a separate grade on each section of the paper. He points out that students know their professors have to read anything they write, and that professors will allow rewrites, so they don't put much effort into their drafts. (He notes that this isn't malice on their part -- they've been trained through high school that a good assignment is a finished one, and he argues that poor performance in wiriting classes has more to do with students choosing not to make any significant effort, rather than students being unable to write.)

I just supervised a teaching demonstration in the Writing Popular Fiction program here at Seton HIll, and the experience inspired me to touch up an old handout on developing ideas for short stories.

A short story is tight -- there is no room for long exposition, there are no subplots to explore, and by the end of the story there should be no loose ends to tie up.  End right at the climax, so that the reader has to imagine how a life-changing event will affect the protagonist.

[...]

While readers of genre fiction (such as horror, fantasy, or mystery) have certain specific expectations, in general the reader's enjoyment comes from identifying the crucial revelation -- what James Joyce described as an epiphany -- that defines the moral significance of the protagonist's actions.

• Your goody-two-shoes protagonist happens upon an envelope from a cancer testing lab.  It's addressed to her arch enemy.  The story ends with the protagonist tearing the envelope open. [What's inside the envelope is not as important as your character's decision to snoop.]
  
• A husband comes home from work early, carrying flowers and a diamond bracelet.  He he hears her singing a romantic duet with someone else. He might first check to see that he's got the receipt, or he might set his jaw and open up the display box, or he might first stick the bracelet in his wife's gas tank.  [We don't actually need to see his wife's reaction -- his decision to knock on the door means he's chosen a confrontation rather than walking away.]
  
• The protagonist is in the upstairs hallway of someone else's house.  She hears snoring in the next room, pulls out a rope, and reaches for the switch in order to turn off the light. [Obviously the story would need to give us a little more detail about who this person is and what she wants, but once she makes her decision, the story is over.]
  

Drawing on real-life experiences, such as winning the big game, bouncing back after an illness or injury, or dealing with the death of a loved one, are attractive choices for students who are looking for a "personal essay" topic. But simply describing powerful emotional experiences ("She would never forget the wonderful feeling..."  "He was more furious than he had ever been...") is not the same thing as generating emotional responses in the reader.

I've become a fan of audiobooks, mostly because I can listen to them while folding laundry or weeding the yard or while auto-piloting my way through the grocery store. I've thought about writing an article like the one that just appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. One book, sampled four ways -- paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and iPhone.  Ann Kirschner beat me to it -- and did a fine job.  She seems surprised at how much she enjoyed the audiobook:

Soon I was looking for any excuse to stay plugged in just a little bit longer. In fact, if I made a graph of total reading time on Little Dorrit, I bet that the audiobook would win (though not for the most pages).

You can listen while you are walking around.

You can listen while driving.

You can listen while applying makeup.

You can listen while you are cooking.

You can listen while you are in the dentist's chair.

Audiobooks also impose a certain discipline. I think of this as real-time reading: The author and narrator control your pace, and it is impractical to skim ahead or thumb back to another section. For Dickens, so naturally cinematic and plot-driven, that can have a breathtaking effect. It was my good fortune to be listening when Little Dorrit and Maggie spent their long night wandering the London streets. I shivered with them, I shared their exhaustion, and I sighed with the dull relief of returning to the Marshalsea prison.

Kirschner notes that young people who grew up playing hand-held games will have no problem reading from small screens.  She's right, though of course when those young people start losing their eyesight, they might appreciate larger displays. 

Right now, I'm struggling through a text-to-speech version of the Illiad, and I'm not enjoying it as much as I have enjoyed some more modern stuff.  I don't think it has much to do with the content, but rather the fact that the past few weeks have been a bit hectic, with my wife having an operation and me needing to take care of her and supervise the home-schooling, while at the same time trying to wrap up the loose ends of the semester.  So I've been hitting the sack pretty late and pretty tired, without the benefit of any commute time or solitary-walk-around-the-quad-with-headphones time.  When I fall asleep during a chapter, I'm more inclined to jump ahead then back up and re-listen, since I know it will take me forever to find out what happens if I try to study each chapter.

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.

Even as the use of electronic media has become common across fields for research and teaching, what is taken for granted among young scholars is still foreign to many of those who sit on tenure and promotion committees. In an effort to confront this problem, the MLA and a consortium called the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory have decided to find new ways to help departments evaluate the kinds of digital scholarship being produced today. The MLA ran a program for department chairs at last year's annual meeting in which chairs were given digital scholarship to evaluate, and that will take place again this year. -- Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed

It's that season of my life... I've got tenure on my mind.

The current summer 100 Days project gathers a group of story writers, poets, visual artists, musicians, and programmers for one hundred days of creative effort.  Each artist's work will be unique yet build on the work of others in the collective.  Here we make, remake, shape and reshape.

• Steve Ersinghaus :: Story
• Carianne Garside :: Painting
• James Revillini :: jQuery
• John Timmons :: Sounds
• Jessica Somers :: Photos
• Neha Bawa :: Poetry
• Mindy Bray :: Photos
• Maggie Ducharme :: Meals
• Susan Ersinghaus :: Suburbs
• Denna Hintze-Yates :: Verbal Image
• Dave Pender :: Drawings

My former student Neha Bawa is among the participants. I have enjoyed learning from the new media pedagogy of Steve Ersinghaus and John Timmons. I'm also particularly interested in James Revillini's scripting experiments.

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.)

A touching tribute in images and words. Phillip Toledano

A budding artist learns his real skill is not artistry, but the ability to critique. I'm blogging this for the next time I introduce iteration as an important cognitive skill -- something that requires dedication, time, and a willingness to take risks in order to learn from failures (something that doesn't often fit will with millennials who fear losing points for not "getting the right answer" on the first try).

Drawing what you actually see--that is, drawing the plastic bull that's in front of you rather than the simplified, idealized image of a bull that's in your head--is something that does not come naturally to most people, let alone children. At its root, my gift was not the ability to draw what I saw. Rather, it was the ability to look at what I had drawn thus far and understand what was wrong with it.

While other children were satisfied with their loosely connected conglomerations of orbs and sticks, I saw something that bore little resemblance to its subject. And so, in my own work, I attempted to make the necessary corrections. When that failed, as it inevitably did, I started over. Again and again and again, each time making minor improvements, but all the while still seeing all the many ways that I had failed to persuade my body to produce the correct line or apply the appropriate coloring. -- John Siracusa, Ars Technica

This reminds me of what Robert Heinlein says about being a writer. Paraphrasing: anyone can become a writer, but what's really hard is staying a writer.

The first time I taught a lit crit class at Seton Hill, students felt overwhelmed by the almost-weekly paper assignments. It wasn't fair, some of them said, that I graded them on the essays they wrote before the class discussions, since it was often only after the class discussions that they understood the topic they wrote the essays about.  This time around, I made an extra effort to front-load the idea that the essays are designed to improve the quality of the discussions. If everybody showed up at the discussions without having first tried to write a paper about reader-response theory or semiotics or formalism, then the discussions would not be very useful. 

I did give the students a chance to re-do one of their ten critical theory exercises, and in general the exercises were going so well that I relaxed a little and let the students write a creative hypertext or a letter to the editor if they wanted to. But the rigor of doing a short paper every week, and committing their initial ideas to paper, before showing up in class, really helped develop their critical thinking skills.  By the last week of classes, after I returned their rough drafts of their term papers, I got confident, satisfied smiles from the class.  They knew what they had to do, and they knew they could do it.  It was very rewarding.

That kind of confidence comes only with practice.

A masterful spoof of one of my favorite literary works, skewering a reference book I spent a lot of time with in my formative years..

'Tis hard to say, which promises more Loot:
Writing, or Telling others how to do't. -- Geoff Nunberg

His ear was severed by a sword wielded by his friend, the painter, Paul Gauguin, in a drunken row over a woman called Rachel and the true nature of art. Gauguin lied about the incident and fled, two German art historians now believe. Van Gogh covered up to protect his friend and was placed in a mental institution.

[...]

Nina Zimmer, curator of a large Van Gogh exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Basle until September, is unconvinced. "Maybe they are right," she said. "But almost any theory is plausible because there are so few established facts." -- John Lichfield

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)

I try to read to my kids for an hour every night -- sometimes two hours, if we time everything right. 

Whenever I need about 20 minutes to do a load of laundry or make a phone call, I tell the kids "It's time for the book game," which involves each child picking a book for Peter to read to Carolyn. (Berenstein Bears and Magic School Bus titles are still favorites for both kids, though Peter will cheerfully read a My Little Pony or Strawberry Shortcake book if that's what Carolyn chooses.)

We try to keep a chapter book going that both my son (age 11) and daughter (recently turned 7) are interested in, I read a series of shorter books for my daughter (I do a damn fine reading of Bartholomew and the Oobleck, if I do say so myself) and after she goes to bed, I read a different chapter book with my son. 

Tonight I just finished finished reading the final chapter of The Story of Rolf and the Viking Bow, which starts out as a kind of sequel to Icelandic legends, featuring prophecies, storms and shipwrecks, generational feuds, banishments and vengeance, Vikings, some wonderful secret-passage cloak-and-dagger intrigue that reminds me of the classic Mission: Impossible (not the recent Tom Cruise movies), and ends up with a climactic bromance showdown that brought tears to my eyes.

My 11-year-old son needed a hug at the end of it, it was so emotional for both of us.

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

This article describes how the Columbia School of Journalism is redesigning its program in order to integrate new media and business skills into the traditional journalism program.

Currently, most student work in the introductory course is in print -- sometimes published by a professor on a course's Web page. It is Grueskin's hope that, in the future, these students might produce more multimedia-driven pieces at this early stage as well.

"It's important for the school and for our students that Web training not be segregated from the core journalism curriculum," Grueskin said. "I think it's important for us to address digital skills training for everybody, not just those who will be new media majors. Students who are multi-talented will have the intellectual dexterity to adapt to some of the technological change that will come in the next 5 to 10 years. Still, at the core is journalism. All of the [new media] tools in the world don't cover up bad journalism."-- David Moltz, Inside Higher Ed

Seton Hill's new media journalism program includes "Writing for the Internet" and "New Media Projects," along with plenty of blogging in the other journalism classes. Students also learn about being a freelance writer, how to deal with agents and copyright and other nuts and bolts in "Publications Workshop."

Recently I was thinking about what kind of a math course might appeal to English majors, since journalists have to deal with statistics, and reporters who know their way around a balance sheet or a corporate annual report will be well equipped to sniff out information for a story.

What would it have been like to be brought up by George Orwell? Pretty grim, you might think. But you would be wrong. In June 1944, Orwell and his wife Eileen adopted a three-week-old boy whom they named Richard Horatio Blair (Eric Blair being Orwell's real name). Now a retired engineer living happily in an immaculate house in a picture-book Warwickshire village, Blair has never publicised the fact that he was related to Orwell, always preferring to remain in the background. But ahead of a talk at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival with Orwell's biographer DJ Taylor (details, below right), Richard agreed to speak to me about his memories of his childhood. -- John Carey,The Times Online

Since this is published in the review section, it looks like the website automatically appends "review | Non-fiction book reviews" to the article title (in the <title></title> tags, visible in the colored stripe at the very top of your browser window), but this isn't a book review, it's a personality profile.

A minor disturbance is a 6, while a major disturbance is a 6X. A major accident is a 7X. An officer wanting to grab something to eat? That's a 50.

Got that? 10-4. (Understood.)

Dallas police acknowledge there could be a slight learning curve for some officers and dispatchers. But they don't anticipate issues, especially because the department already has practice using plain language.

When Dallas housed Hurricane Katrina evacuees, several agencies used the same radio system. So, the departments "had to take care to use terminology that we would understand," Dallas Police Lt. Chris Aulbaugh said. -- Eric Aasen, Dallas Morning News

The article notes that different agencies with different codes had difficulty trying to work together after the 9/11 attacks.  The specialized language becomes a marker for members of the law enforcement community, but in times of crisis, according to the article, experienced officers realize you can get more done when you drop the specialized codes.