In my opinion, Google today is far from the great search engine it was in those far-off days, yet I still use it. Even knowing that it indexes only a small proportion of the web using a technique that too often gives precedence to pages that lack authority or coherence, that it is skewed by…
I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a sports fan. And here’s one reason why. “When I was (in school), we had a day when everyone who was receiving scholarships — academic or athletic — was called up at an assembly and honored. One guy who barely met NCAA requirements got a full athletic…
Count your ideas. Be careful not to have too many. | And if a student dares to have four ideas, instead of three? . . . Toss one out. Only three ideas allowed. I’ve seen students fail assignments because they had the wrong numbers. | And they can’t stop writing that way. Many have told…
His voice was calm, but I could tell by his furrowed brow that what he truly wanted to say was, “Graduate school is a slow and unrelenting descent into hell. Save yourself while you still can.” | I felt the earth move under my feet. Grad school had been my last great hope. For most…
It’s a peculiarity of scholarly life that everyone is expected to be able to deliver a lecture well, but almost no one is trained to do it….If you put your bulleted ideas up on slides, your audience will look at the slides, not at you. You’ll also be teaching them that What You Have to…
Everyone knows that some very good people leave teaching because it pays so poorly. Some experts estimate that there is one well-qualified teacher not teaching for every one now in the classroom. Under my Leave No Teacher Behind Act, some of these people would surely return and others stay. That would increase the pool of…
It’s no coincidence that the most-read blogs are created by professional writers. They have essentially suckered thousands of newbies, mavens, and just plain folk into blogging, solely to get return links in the form of the blogrolls and citations. This is, in fact, a remarkably slick grassroots marketing scheme that is in many ways awesome,…
We live in the dark ages of digital media. We fantasize about the infinite possibilities and revolutionary potential of the Web, about how free information wants to be, about uploading our brain to a hard drive — but we actually know less about the creative computing that happened in our lifetimes than some people know…
Some may not like the US President, but we should all appreciate what America has done for the world …. I don’t want the Americans to go home. In fact I am terrified of what would happen if they did. Their going home in the past has often meant suffering for others. Sure, I want…
I suppose you could say that the subhead trend bothers me because I’m a writer and I try desperately to perfect antiquated stuff. Transitions and Flow Like transitions and flow, and because I think writing, like most everything else good in life, revolves around flow and rhythm. But the truth is, subheads bug me even…
Professors today often believe erroneously that they are already teaching critical thinking in their courses and that students are absorbing it… “[College seinors] say, ‘Look how open-minded I am.’ But when pressed to say, ‘What do you think about this? What suggestions would you make and what are they based on?’ – that’s when the…
Why do so many graduate programs teach students to hate what made so many of us want to become teachers and scholars when we were undergraduates: reading literature — old and new, from every culture — as if it was more than symptomatic of deplorable cultural pathologies? —Thomas H. Benton —College and the Fall (Chronicle) I…
One of my classmates saw my wedding ring and asked if I was married. I said, yes, and she asked, “Happily?” Another student sneered, “Wow, married … how retro-hetero-normative.” Others snickered in approval. And so the seven-year assault on my values began. To avoid harassment, I learned to conceal who I was: my faith, my…
[W]hen the results of his DNA test came back, he found himself staggered by the idea that though he still qualified as a person of color, it was not the color he was raised to think he was, one with a distinct culture and definitive place in the American struggle for social equality that he’d…
To be a Christian doesn’t mean to be cuddly. This is not a cuddly pope, either. What he says and writes — though always elegantly — has been irking millions. He, who was instrumental in toppling socialism, is an inveterate preacher of justice and peace, and a critic of the modern “Me First” variety of…
On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable–except for…
[T]he recipients of higher education (along with the parents whose experience is 30 years out-of-date if they had one) do not know in advance what they need. If they did, they wouldn’t need it, and what they often want, at least at the outset, is an education that will tax their energies as little as…
Defendants will distribute the Net Settlement Fund by providing a discount at the cash registers of all KB Toys, KB Toy Works, KB Toy Outlet, Toy Liquidator and KB Toys Express stores nationwide, including Guam and Puerto Rico, equal to 30% off all qualifying purchases of $30 or more during October 8-14, 2003. This distribution…
Being of the generation that wanted to both bring home the bacon and fry it, I didn’t plan on going back to part-time work, and neither did many of my friends and colleagues who have done so. But we all had an eye open for opportunities and were willing to go out on a professional…
Over three decades of teaching has taught me that it’s impossible to teach students. I can only teach English literature to students. And to do that I need to know a lot more about English literature than I ever plan to teach. —Nils Clausson —How to Tell the Good Teacher From the Bad. (Irascible Professor)…