“You can concentrate the history of all mankind into the evolution of flax, cotton, and wool fibers into clothing,” asserted Dewey. He described a class where students handled wool and cotton. As they discovered how hard it was to separate seeds from cotton, they came to understand why their ancestors wore woolen clothing. Working in…
The girl amusing herself on our 70m commute to rehearsal, as we listen to the LibriVox “Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.” Similar:Opening night. Support local artists in your community!PersonalThe Neutral Zone (ST:TNG Rewatch: Season 1, Episode 25)Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generatio…CultureSaturday morning cartoons are no moreI certainly have fond memories of Saturd…BusinessDogmeat and I may…
In a final reflection video for a freshman writing class, a student gave a personal shout-out to me and to every classmate over a moody guitar soundtrack, and now apparently I have something in my eye.
As a kid, I remember studying my CRT displays with a microscope. Each pixel that I could control with BASIC on my TRS-80 or Atari 800 or Commodore-64 was made up of tiny arrays of red, blue, and green dots that I could not control directly. There was one display mode of the Atari 800…
Fake news is not a problem caused by those dishonorable people whose political values differ from yours. Misinformation researchers have proposed two competing hypotheses for why people fall for fake news on social media. The popular assumption—supported by research on apathy over climate change and the denial of its existence—is that people are blinded by partisanship,…
For the UK Guardian, the news is the words the White House used while accusing Acosta of an action caught on video. For Fox, Sanders was accused of sharing an allegedly “‘doctored’” video of a neutrally-identified “interaction.” For the Washington Post, the White House “shares doctored video” — no accusation, no scare quotes. Read…
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:Ultimate Infographic Design Guide + Design Tricks – VenngageThis website is selling something. You c…AestheticsYoungster in a tight spot has an inspirationhttps://twitter.com/TheFigen/status/1550…AwesomeErmahgerddon: The…
Update — Media Bias Chart 10.0 All human endeavors are biased. Vanessa Otero’s chart, which places various news organizations on a 2D chart with a left/centrist/right X axis, and a quality/garbage vertical axis, is a good opportunity to remind ourselves that seeking out and relying on quality reporting from “the other side” is an important…
I got a perfect score. How did you do on this Pew Research quiz? See below how your results for the factual and opinion statements compared with the 5,035 randomly sampled adults that took part in our national survey and review how you responded to each question. For more information, see the full report, “Distinguishing Between…
I touched up and board-ified a presentation on “fake news” for Seton Hill’s “Celebration of Scholarship” event. Similar:LEGO turned itself around by analyzing overbearing parents[C]hildren play to get oxygen, to unders…CultureSights, Sounds, and Smells of Elizabethan TheaterSomewhere during my education I picked u…AcademiaCompleted uniforms for the officers and crew from the #neovictorian #steampunk bedtime sto……
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…
There are ways to raise a child’s test scores that have nothing to with helping that child learn. In the past 10 years I have seen far more students — even the most capable, most brilliant students — paralyzed with fear about grades. In high school, you got good grades if you followed instructions and…
The New York Public Library has a program that lets youths check out briefcases, handbags, and neckties for job interviews or other formal occasions.
Transcript: Me: (Starts writing a routine email for textbook adoption committee.) Me: (Accidentally paraphrases part of Roy Batty’s “Tears in rain” monologue.) Me: (Checks IMDB to refresh my memory of the full quote.) Me: (Checks Blade Runner Wiki to confirm umlaut in Tannhäuser Gate.) Me: (Looks up Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser.) Me: What, what was…
As circulation has declined, local newspapers have had to adjust for the loss in revenue, sometimes by shrinking the size of their staffs, sometimes by selling out or closing up shop all together.
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…
Gearing up for teaching a new “American Lit 1776-Present” course. I’ll be at the office, sitting at my desk all day, wearing long pants instead of shorts. Not a screw gun or a stage platform or a digital camera within reach. This essay offers some well-phrased arguments for reading classic literature. Nothing strikes me more…
Sometimes my students get nervous because I ask them to learn writing by, you know, writing. For some other subjects, it makes sense to ease students into the work, having them memorize facts to recall for points on multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank quizzes. But writers gotta write. That means taking risks, and occasionally stumbling. In a…
Verrit, like Snopes, Politifact, and a host of other fact-checking sites, reflect fundamental misunderstandings about how information circulates online, what function political information plays in social contexts, and how and why people change their political opinions. Fact-checking is in many ways a response to the rapidly changing norms and practices of journalism, news gathering, and…
Helping my students understand how my role as a college literature teacher differs from the role of a high school English teacher is a sometimes daunting task. Preparing students for a standardized reading test is completely unlike teaching them about a work of classic literature. In an English class addressing The Great Gatsby, depending on student ability…