No, I don’t want to see the new jacket you picked out with your mother. No, I don’t want the hamburger you brought home for me. No, I don’t want to go for a walk. At least not while I’m marking notes on page 7 of this student’s 10-page term paper draft. I hear you.…
One of our seniors interviewed recent graduates for her Honors project. It’s all too common for English majors to hear “What can you do with an English degree?” from well-meaning relatives and friends, implying that the most viable career for an English major is that of a “starving artist.” So what can you do with…
However, running parallel to the evolution of these [graphic] games was a family of explicitly, un- ashamedly narrative titles. Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther & Woods, 1977), Zork I (1980), and Adventureland (Andventure International, 1978) have equal importance in the evolution of video games, but rarely receive the same kind of general, mainstream popular cultural appreciation…
Talked too much during a meeting today. Somehow ended up making two good suggestions. Guess who has two more items on his to-do list. Similar:Police raid best-selling Turkish newspaper hours after government takes it overTurkish authorities seized control of th…BusinessA selfie with a Chekov action figure after learning of Anton Yelchin's deathCurrent_EventsWe'll Always Have Paris…
“The Rolling Stone article viewed by millions fueled a court of public opinion that ostracized Phi Kappa Psi members and led to vandalism of the fraternity house,” the fraternity’s statement said. “Clearly our fraternity and its members have been defamed, but more importantly we fear this entire episode may prompt some victims to remain in…
Sloppy journalism can ruin lives. Check your sources. Before publishing accusations against someone, get that person’s side of the story. My personal belief is that it’s silly to want to join clubs with greek letters, but then again in my spare time in the past few weeks I have pretended to be shot by a…
“There’s such an emphasis on keeping student enthusiasm going and getting them to want to actively participate. When you start talking about grammar, it’s like asking them to eat their vegetables, and no one wants to ask them to do that.” —Death to high school English – Salon.com. Similar:Facebook touts fight on fake news, but…
Some days I am not Dennis. I am Marky McPaper Markerson. Or Meety McMeeter Meetingson. Days that I’m Ready McReader Readerson, it’s not so bad, but only part of that time am I reading for pleasure — I’m often reading to decide whether to teach a particular text, or wondering whether I should teach Flannery…
Blog ten-beat lines of verse, like Shakespeare wrote. But lazy bloggers, fill you not your posts With words transpos’d, poetic more to seem. Like this, who speaks? Like Yoda will you sound. Nor stuff your limping lines with pointless words And really wasteful phrases filling space And stretching points so thin across each line In order to fulfill the ten-beat rule. Yet rhymeless…
Looks like the quality control process at this school needs a little refinement.“The image was not representative of UNG’s commitment to diversity, and this will serve as an opportunity for increased dialogue about diversity issues and we expect that to better inform our processes and publications,” said Kate Maine, the university official. —Raw Story Similar:In…
This is good news. It’s unfair that government-funded studies get published in private databases that make money off of the public’s desire to access results of studies paid for by our taxes. NSF will require that articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers in juried conference proceedings or transactions be deposited in a public access…
When Board examinations are due in Bihar, parents tighten their belts, pull up their socks and transform overnight into expert rock climbers. They scale walls made of brick and mortar without any fear. Where Spiderman needs a web to swing from one building to another or a spider bite to grow tiny hair on his…
I quibble with The Chronicle headline writer’s notion that paper & pencil are “no-tech,” but hand-written notes are valuable. Students tested right after a lecture tended to answer factual questions equally well regardless of how they took notes, but students who handwrote their notes did consistently better on conceptual questions. What’s more, when students were…
Test subjects whose test papers “accidentally” included the answer key had an inflated sense of how well they would do on a follow-up test that did not include answers, suggesting that the cheaters were not aware how much their performance on the first test was dependent on their access to answers. The people who’d had…
I love giving the “what is rhetoric” lecture in my freshman writing seminar. Most students have at least heard of a rhetorical question, but most don’t know what “rhetoric” means, nor have they heard of logos, pathos and ethos. The first thing that students need to know about rhetoric, then, is that it’s all around…
A chemist celebrates the liberal arts. Our culture has drawn an artificial line between art and science, one that did not exist for innovators like Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs. Leonardo’s curiosity and passion for painting, writing, engineering and biology helped him triumph in both art and science; his study of anatomy and dissections…
If there really are teachers who list assignments by “do date” rather than “due date,” I’ve never heard from one. Students who fall behind sometimes say “I didn’t know whether the readings listed for Monday are due on *Monday* or whether they are due on *Wednesday*.” How likely is it that the student really *is*…
The idea of students as customers relies on models of customer service that are not what experts in the field actually teach (as explicated in this letter to The Chronicle by Clara Burke). We develop crude quantitative evaluative tools while businesses use more and more complex qualitative focus groups and sophisticated assessments. And we apply…
In the past few years, I have noticed more students are applying the word “novel” to any text they might be asked to study in class, whether that text is a book-length fictional narrative, a play, a poem, a political manifesto, or a collection of academic essays. I wrote up this lecture to introduce the…
Okay, I confess, I was once in the audience at an MLA session about medieval drama, when someone brought up a relevant computer simulation, and there was a disagreement over how to interpret the results. I raised my hand and said, “I created that simulation,” and weighed in on one side of the debate. It all…