Daughter Carolyn plays Cherry in Prime Stage’s production of The Outsiders (Mar 6-15)

My daughter Carolyn plays Cherry in Prime Stage’s production of The Outsiders (Mar 6-15). Because Prime Stage works to incorporate the curriculum of local schools, each production contains a student matinee performance, allowing the students to connect more deeply to their school readings through theater. Prime Stage also seeks to bring each work of literature to life authentically. To that end, The Outsiders was cast age-appropriately, with each actor being…

Ring Theory Helps Us Bring Comfort In … and “dump” our own stuff out.

I spent some time listening to someone who was grieving, and who was frustrated by someone else who was also grieving. I could see that these two suffering people weren’t in the same circle of grief — a concept I learned about from someone’s social media post (can’t remember whose). Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of…

Fascinating, and very sad, story behind an iconic National Geographic photo.

Fascinating, and very sad, story behind an iconic National Geographic photo. McCurry wanted to take more pictures but Sharbat Gula fled. No part of the written story mentioned her narrative or even her name (which McCurry did not care to find out). He did not take her consent or her father’s to publish the image. When Sharbat Gula finally saw the cover that would make her face world-famous, she felt,…

Pop song lyrics use more negative words (“hate”, “sorrow”) than 50 years ago

The use of words related to negative emotions has increased by more than one third…. If we assume an average of 300 words per song, every year there are 30,000 words in the lyrics of the [Billboard] top-100 hits. In 1965, around 450 of these words were associated with negative emotions, whereas in 2015 their number was above 700. Meanwhile, words associated with positive emotions decreased in the same time period.

My students seem increasingly confused by the difference between journal title vs. article title

Sometimes students will submit bibliography entries that repeat both titles — either the journal or the article.  I assume they are using an online citation generator and I assume they’re not bothering to check its output.  What I had previously thought of as a random careless error now seems evidence of a paradigm shift. I’ve been teaching on the assumption that students are more familiar with the concept of a…