A cast of hundreds participated in a public medieval re-enactment dramatizing the Christian story from Creation through Final Judgement at the University of Toronto a few weeks ago. I attended as the event videographer. I had at least three cameras running at all times — sometimes five — while a roving camera also caught the…
This is what I’m in Toronto to observe. Similar:The Scapegoat by Richard Maples (1957 Sci-Fi Short Story)“If music be the food of love, play on!” I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who d…Touch Me Now: York Plays 2025Pesky journalists, always showing up to document atrocities.I MacGyvered myself a heat sinkCockatoos start sipping…
I’ll be in Toronto next week to observe and document a full production of the York Corpus Christi Cycle. The event, which took place annually for hundreds of years in the streets of the medieval city of York, dramatizes the Christian salvation story from the creation of the universe to the final judgement. The plays,…
We’re drawn to activities that invite us to grow, by trying and trying again, because we want to evolve as people. Life is mostly repetitive—wake, eat, work, sleep, repeat—and each day can feel like an unsatisfying circle. But repetition with variation broadens us. It makes our circular days into spiralling journeys. “The spiral is a…
Similar:Did you like or share that social media post about two Camp Mystic girls found in a tree?“If music be the food of love, play on!” I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who d…Touch Me Now: York Plays 2025Pesky journalists, always showing up to document atrocities.How to be a Medieval Spectator (Intro…
Similar:The Scapegoat by Richard Maples (1957 Sci-Fi Short Story)“If music be the food of love, play on!” I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who d…Touch Me Now: York Plays 2025Pesky journalists, always showing up to document atrocities.How to be a Medieval Spectator (Intro to Toronto York Plays 2025)Cockatoos start sipping from Sydney’s…
I first taught Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle during an intensive 3-week online course during the 2020-21 winter break, during the Time of Covid. The nature of that course was such that I could only reasonably require students to read 6 of Wilson’s 10 plays; I think I required everyone to read 4, and then split the…
I planned ahead pretty well this term. I like the pace in all my classes.
After marking a set of bibliography exercises, I created this graphic to focus on the kinds of citation errors I found in submissions that students clearly aren’t proofreading. I’m amazed that students don’t correct the capitalization errors (often caused by the keywords the student was searching for) or when they don’t notice that entries repeat…
My years of watching MacGyver definitely paid off. (Not that my GenZ students got the reference.) I’m doing a lot more in-class work with paper, giving students handouts to annotate in class, asking them to write in copybooks. For the midterm I gave students a short academic article, excerpts from a play we haven’t read…
Here’s my letter responding to an recent article about the future of the student newspaper I advised for over two decades. A pause. The Seton Hill University student paper is on what my English department colleagues described in a recent email as “indefinite hiatus.” At the time, we didn’t know for how long. I was…
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I felt like a capitalist, buying in bulk on the cheap and selling individual books for $2 (about a 20-cent profit, per book, but I’m really rounding up so I don’t have to deal with change). Students will spend time in class annotating printouts and writing in their copybooks. They’ll still do online activities but…
I’m also thinking of the cost to the students who have to repeat a course or fail out of a demanding program because they couldn’t AI their way to a passing grade. “People use it much more than we expected,” the cofounder wrote, later adding in response to another user that he “personally chose the price and…
I’m far from perfect, and injustice and suffering and tragedy in the world won’t be much affected by the story I’m about to narrate, but as I was walking in the mall with my son, I dictated a 500-word email response to a student whose paper topic didn’t work out and who asked for my…
The daughter missed her graduation ceremony because she was performing in Kinetic Theatre‘s A SHERLOCK CAROL. Thank you, David Whalen for officiating in this “irregular” backstage ceremony! Similar:“If music be the food of love, play on!” I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who d…Touch Me Now: York Plays 2025How to be a…
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When I went off to college to be an English major, my father (who passed last December at 90) told me a story about how his respected professor at Northwestern University spent a whole lecture on the seven levels of symbolism in Melville’s Moby-Dick. Being of an analytical mind and precise mind, my father copied…
When I ask my students to use the library database to find scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles, some students stick with the search methods they’re already familiar with, and they submit works cited lists that include articles written by undergraduate interns, or articles from low-value pay-to-publish ecosystems like “Frontiers.” While I don’t read every article students…
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