Fie upon your multi-page, ad-stuffed crapfest of shame. (Don’t click!)

What I wrote is not actually a list, just a narrative rant against clickbait listicles. Similar:Ushering for a school matinee. Love seeing the kids excited about @prime_stage Frankenstei… CultureThe Truth About Test ScoresIt’s not hard to design a test that has …BusinessStupid Puns For the WinMy daughter just trounced me in a pun wa…AmusingComments on:…

Apology of Socrates, By Plato

Aristotle classified Plato’s work, representing Socrates’s defense against charges that he corrupted the youth of Athens, as a fiction. But what words! What a defense! (“Greatest mind of history / Solving life’s sweet mystery.” —Schwartz) For I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your…

Is your child texting about recursive acronym palindromes?

Is your child texting about recursive acronym palindromes? lol = linguists overinterpret lol gtg = gtg tokenizes gatekeeping mcm = man-crush-monday connotes mania wcw = whoever created woman-crush-wednesday brb = befoggedly redefine brb   Similar:Poetry Stimulates the Brain's Reward-Anticipation Arousal Near Ends of StanzasI fixed the NY Mag’s clickbaity title, “…AestheticsIntegrating Quotations in Research Papers:…

If I am not a pedagogical god, at least my marking app has no ungraded submissions.

  Similar:Sibling Affection and Paternal Abstraction as Drawn By a Six-Year-Old; or, Aren't My Daugh…My six-year-old daughter is a very visua…AmusingDaughter Carolyn plays Cherry in Prime Stage's production of The Outsiders (Mar 6-15)My daughter Carolyn plays Cherry in Prim…BooksThe Girl Has Started Rehearsals for PICT Classic Theatre’s Jane EyreI’ve chauffeured the girl into Pittsburg…BooksTime Squared…

Certainty vs. uncertainty: “In which are we more likely to be deceived, and in which has rhetoric the greater power?”

I’ve taught Plato’s Phaedrus before, but in the past I have mostly focused on brief passages in which the characters discuss writing, which is really just a side issue. The purpose of today is mostly just to accustom my “History and Future of the Book” students to oral classical culture, in the hopes they’ll get…

One of my undergrad lit papers. Dot-matrix printed, with hand-written instructor annotations, c. 1988.

Similar:31 Undeniable Truths That Journalism Majors Can All Agree OnBecause you know you have the chance to …AcademiaSpring 2020 Quarantine Grades SubmittedPersonalIf I don’t design the sign for the pub on my #steampunk space cruiser, who will? #prioriti… AestheticsAs a student journo, naturally I covered the visit from Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry…I recall just…

Socrates envisaged a time when we would forget how to remember.

From Daisy Dunn’s review of Puchner’s The Written World: Socrates envisaged a time when we would forget how to remember. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Indian epic Ramayanahad been preserved through an oral tradition that seemed destined to perish through overreliance on papyrus. Akhmatova remembered because she had to but Socrates simply chose to. He…

You come very close to successfully combining argument and explication here…

I recently came across a box of old writing, including a binder where I had saved some undergraduate papers.   When returning a Beowulf paper for a Brit Lit survey, my instructor had stapled a page of hand-written notes that began, “You come very close to successfully combining argument and explication here, much closer than…

Details from the author’s life are not the magic ticket to “correct” interpretations in literature class

Students who are new to college literature classes often value literary biography very highly, expecting that one of their tasks is to spot one-to-one relationships between the literary texts and the personal lives of the authors. For instance, from the two Sylvia Plath poems that use Nazi imagery to describe troubled relationships with paternal figures,…

My schedule every Friday this term. (Payback for teaching a course over Christmas break.)

  Similar:My Shakespeare students are off peer reviewing their term paper rough drafts. I’m official…AcademiaHome Soil (TNG Rewatch: Season 1, Episode 17)The concept was good, and the production…PersonalWhen students don't show up during office hours: I adjusted the cabinet and added a new (s…AestheticsChurning Out More Non-profit Arts PromosAs part of my volunteer work for…