I got an email this morning from someone who went to my high school a few years behind me… she is now a high school teacher, and had asked the lit magazine editor to dig up a spoof of Beowulf she remembered reading back in the day. I only barely remember writing it. This excerpt…
Similar:Graduation procession #classof2017PersonalI have two scenes in a horror film. My head appears in a third scene.During Fall Break, I filmed my scenes fo…AestheticsI accidentally did too much DuoLingo. I don't want to advance to the harder league. Come o…EducationDon't call it "social distancing" or you just might get a polite correction from the admin…AcademiaOedipus…
Last year, SHU did not sponsor a bus trip to Washington D.C., so I did not arrange a field trip to the Newseum. Seeing a chunk of the Berlin Wall, an antenna from the World Trade Center in front of a display of 9/11 front pages from around the world, Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski’s cabin, and…
Me: It took a few days for the spool of microfilm to arrive via interlibrary loan. I’d use this steampunk contraption to manually seek the right page in the book. But I found it. Crying stock photo child: (Sniff) Checking sources was scary ‘n’ hard in 2006! Me: Yes it was, crying stock photo child. Yes…
Facebook has monetized access to online content. The mobile apps make it difficult for you to actually leave Facebook to follow a link, which means Facebook is increasingly showing other people’s content, bypassing the creator’s own ads (and their “subscribe” and “comment” and “contact us” and “archive” buttons). As Internet comedy writer Matt Klinman puts…
It was pleasurable to encounter a familiar reference to Plato’s Phaedrus (which I just assigned in my Media & Culture class) in this Atlantic article on memory in the digital information age. With its streaming services and Wikipedia articles, the internet has lowered the stakes on remembering the culture we consume even further. But it’s…
I don’t generally like teaching with slide decks, but students are used to them. I use a typeface that makes it easy for me to pretend I’m creating Okudagrams for Star Trek: TNG computer displays.Â
Similar:Stage Right's production of 'Secret Garden' is heart-tugging showIn the Stage Right production, the role …Current_EventsThe Abomination of Ebooks: They Price People Out of Reading Random House, which jacked up its eboo…BooksWhat Khan Academy's Fun, Free Learning Empire Has to Do with Dystopian Social Control Over the Christmas break, I’ve been ch…AcademiaChilling on Forbes Avenue with…
I learned a lot while watching this video. I didn’t realize how much of this movie was driven by off-screen narration. The whole “The Death Star will be in range in five minutes” sequence was added in post. Similar:Rare find discovered amid town's Old West kitschInstead of dispensing a card like Zoltar…AestheticsThe storage shelves of…
When I do a career planning unit, I am often amused by the students who list “design skills” or “very creative” on their resumes, yet use the exact same MS-Word default resume template. A second observation is that students typically used their cover letters to describe their own emotions (e.g. as their burning desire for…
For an article on communicating research findings in poetic verse rather than academic prose, an article in Qualitative Inquiry cites my Top 10 Poetry Tips handout.
What I wrote is not actually a list, just a narrative rant against clickbait listicles. Similar:Reader, I ushered him. @pictclassictheatrePersonalMotivation Amid Crisis (Autotrophic Bat)As part of an independent study project,…BooksReport to bay 3, where tea will be served as the gondola delivers you to the planet's surf… AestheticsChecking out of @frontporchtheatricals Grand Hotel. What an…
I recently noticed that a blog post I created in 2003 has been getting a spike in traffic. Today my five-year-old son was watching one of my wife’s old Battlestar Galactica videotapes, and I remembered that when I was about 11 I had a crush on the cute bridge crewmember who told the Viper pilots…
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? 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:First They Got Sick, Then They Moved Into a Virtual UtopiaWhen my son was about five, I sat him on…CultureThe Case…
I paid a little attention to a long-neglected RSS aggregator for student blogs. It had stopped working at some point, and was no longer recognizing the RSS feeds generated by WordPress. Fortunately, the Feed Creator for WP RSS Aggregator does the trick — it generates RSS feeds automatically. I’m blogging this in part because every semester…
Similar:Look how the box leads your eye down to the car, then the two signs lead your eye up to th…PersonalBook geyser. My latest #Blender3D practice.In a peaceful grassy setting, a geyser o…AestheticsStage Right offers four versions of its musical 'Annie' | TribLIVELeapin‘ Lizards! There are four versions…Culture‘Twelfth Night’ is a Shakespearean hoot, and…
Books symbolized freedom. Posters of 1942 quoted the president: “Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny. In this…
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…
Teaching students to write does not mean correcting their errors, or even preventing them from making errors. While I’m grateful that autocorrect catches most of my typographical errors, I have so far been unimpressed by software tools that aim to check grammar and style. Most of my students are pretty good readers and writers; if…