Some 2300 years ago in ancient Greece, Plato wrote a dialogue featuring his mentor Socrates, who argued that the ability to churn out the longest written compositions on trivial topics or the shortest compositions on important topics is a shallow skill that has nothing to do with human understanding, much like demonstrating that you can…
What is a double-entry research journal?
Reading with a highlighter in your hand encourages you to agree with or ignore what you read. That’s a very limited way to engage with a text.
By contrast, double-entry notes are a way of making complex connections between different things that you read.
My students often tell me that when they take good double-entry notes, they get a much better paper when the time comes for them to start actually churning out the paragraphs.
Anecdote: [A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Leftovers from the food my colleagues brought in to bribe/reward those few students who showed up on the last day before spring break. (I had 40% attendance.)
MLA In-text citations: Writing that got you through high school won’t do in college.
The daughter was invited back to perform at this year’s Shakespeare Monologue and Scene Contest. @thepublicpgh #prouddad #amazingdaughter #shakespeare
In my lit classes, I’m definitely teaching more short stories and fewer novels that I used to. I’ve expanded the time I spend on note-taking, synthesizing quotes from different sources, and why at the college level it’s not a good paragraph if it simply introduces “One quote that supports my position,” repeats three or four…
For confessionals or tapdance routines vertical video is fine. When my students do multimedia projects I remind them that the video screen in our classroom is horizontal, so if they do use a vertical video there’s plenty of room for them to add infographics and annotations. Or they can actually edit a vertical video. If…
In general, I find Canvas a fairly decent system, but after a particularly frustrating hour wrestling with rubrics, I decided to spend two more hours blogging about my frustrations. I would expect a drop-down list to be populated with all the rubrics I’ve already created for my current class, and it would be a nice…
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After starting my 200-level “Shakespeare in Context” students on a few sonnets, I assigned Twelfth Night (most had never read a Shakespeare comedy before) and Othello (they loved Iago), and then asked them to sample four different plays — The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and Jonson’s…
In September, 2003, I was blogging about What the NY Times called the “campus fad” of Internet plagiarism. “What Does a Professor Do All Day?” (Clearly we are wasting our time whenever we are not standing in front of a classroom.) “Graphic Artist Carefully Assigns Ethnicities To Anthropomorphic Recyclables“ Leni Riefenstahl Dies (although she distanced…
In a writing-intensive class, students need to write extensively to the point that the teacher cannot possibly grade all of it. — Edutopia via NCTE Good advice from an article by Kara Douma, reprinted by NCTE. I need to hear that. The referees don’t score every practice. The coaches don’t give you feedback after…
What would you do? Today I wrote 192 lines of ChoiceScript code to address this journalism lesson.