Until next term, I have zero more unmarked assignments. #fistpump

Until next term, I have zero more unmarked assignments. #fistpump Similar:Price History Chart of The Associated Press Stylebook 2013 (Associated Press Stylebook and…The AP Stylebook jumped in price by more…AcademiaMuch Ado About Nothing (Beatrice is my literary crush.)PersonalCongrats to all the winners at the Pittsburgh 48 Hour Film Project! Bit-Sized Productions …Bit-Sized Productions was nominated…

Yep, it’s time to read student papers on Flannery O’Connor.

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Writing Tips for Critical Thinking

  Critical Thinking Matters Personal Essays vs. Academic Writing Summary vs. Original Ideas Filler: “There Are Many Reasons to Avoid the Filler Phrase ‘There Are’” Bloom’s Taxonomy: Hierarchy of Critical Thinking Skills Similar:Video-Game Violence Is Now a Partisan IssueScholar and essayist Ian Bogost traces t…CultureIs AI making us less intelligent?This morning, after students submitted a…CybercultureI…

Just finished a good literature class discussion on this powerful play.

Would love to teach it to healthcare students someday. Similar:Timescape (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 6, Episode 25) Time bubble aliens lay eggs in Ro…  Rewatching ST:TNG Picard, D…AcademiaVideo: Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror – NASA Jet Propulsion LaboratoryYes, the Mars rovers are cute and wonder…DesignThe Novel as a Tool for SurvivalMuch of what Krystal writes…

My college writing students are out making short videos responding to a prompt.

While my students are out of the room making a video, I’m quickly marking the homework that was due today. When we reconvene we’ll discuss both assignments, and then it’s on to the next task. Similar:Thank you, 1993 Dennis, for documenting this low-resolution (the background image was 640x…Thank you, 1993 Dennis, for documenting …Aesthetics'Jane Austen,…

Trump’s war on the media is driving students to journalism

Twenty-one-year-old political science student Kieran McMurchy says he’s shocked at how quickly Trump supporters have “lost faith in pillars of free speech like the Washington Post and the New York Times.” A few months ago, he was planning to go to law school. Now, he says he’s fired up to be a journalist. “It’s definitely concerning the way…

Professoring. With an(other) apple pie cupcake.

I touched up and board-ified a presentation on “fake news” for Seton Hill’s “Celebration of Scholarship” event. Similar:BlewsMicrosoft researchers discuss Blews, whi…CybercultureYes, this is my 11yo daughter yodeling on stage.http://youtu.be/reyclH7zuHIAmusingThe right — and surprisingly wrong — ways to get kids to sit still in class When it came time for me to make sugge…CultureGrades submitted.AcademiaStudents…

What the ‘Grievance Studies’ Hoax Means

 As the hoaxers explained in Areo, they targeted fields they pejoratively dub “grievance studies” — “gender studies, masculinities studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, critical whiteness theory, fat studies, sociology, and educational philosophy” — which they consider peculiarly susceptible to fashionable nonsense. Does the hoax identify something uniquely rotten in gender and sexuality studies, or could…

Opinion | Fake News Comes to Academia

The three academics call themselves “left-leaning liberals.” Yet they’re dismayed by what they describe as a “grievance studies” takeover of academia, especially its encroachment into the sciences… The trio say they’ve proved that higher ed’s fixation on identity politics enables “absurd and horrific” scholarship. Their submissions were outlandish—but no more so, they insist, than others written in earnest and published by these journals.

Gender, Place & Culture, for instance, published a 2017 paper that wasn’t a hoax analyzing the “feminist posthumanist politics” of what squirrels eat. This year Hypatia, a journal of feminist philosophy, published an analysis of a one-woman show featuring “the onstage cooking of hot chocolate and the presence of a dead rat.” The performance supposedly offers “a synthaesthetic portrait of poverty and its psychological fallout.”

The Decline of Humanities Enrollments and the Decline of Pre-Law

It’s a myth that humanities majors don’t care about post-graduation employment. What changed was the safety valve of subsequent law school enrollment.

Law school was long the default post-graduation plan for majors in qualitative fields. As long as you had the prospect of a lucrative legal career after college, you could safely major in English or poli sci. Those students didn’t ignore the vocational imperative; they just postponed it. And for a long time, that worked pretty well.

But the Great Recession, combined with AI and offshoring, did a number on law as a career option.

Headshot of U.S. President Donald J. Trump

How Trump Is Making Journalism School Great Again

This is an important time to teach people what journalists do and why it matters. “The media” is much larger than “journalists devoted to the objective coverage of the news.”  If you don’t like the slant, or the shallowness, or the opportunism of the media you run across, then check out several different sources, including…

Anonymous comment cards from student journalists at the end of the second week.

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Digital literacy is different from print literacy. How do we balance the trade-off?

My job includes teaching students to read long, complex texts (novels, play scripts, and academic texts.) My job also includes asking students to write researched essays that are longer documents than many of them at first seem comfortable reading. Years after they graduate, students often thank me for what I’ve taught them, and say the…

Pioneering Harvard Blog Site Wrapping It Up

I still use blogs.setonhill.edu, which I started in 2003. Not for every class, but for most of my discussion-heavy in-person classes. Weblogs@Harvard, as it was then known, was considered pioneering. Facebook didn’t yet exist. Social media was in its infancy. And starting a blog usually required some knowledge of code. Harvard’s blogging platform, now known…

Student journalist experiences the ‘trickle down’ of hostility toward the press

My own students haven’t described encounters like this, but I have encountered students who enter the classroom with the idea that there is a fairly consistent, uniform, organized entity called “the media” that it’s fashionable to distrust. It’s fair to point to specific news stories that got specific facts wrong or that showed bias, but…