The money quote: “In this essay, I argue that To Kill a Mockingbird fails to aptly demonstrate the practice of cross-radal empathy. As a consequence, readers cannot empathize with the (largely silent) black characters of the novel.” Empathy–how it is discussed and deployed by both the characters in Mockingbird and by the author, Lee–is a…
Show up, prepared and on time, not just when you feel like it. Take directions gratefully — and this means not being offended if you’re corrected in public. Knowing a particular skill or craft is not as important as knowing how to learn new things — and that means a willingness to step out of…
When I was about 10, I wrote to NASA and got a big packet of color magazines and newsletters on the Space Shuttle and Voyager missions. I loved staying up late watching live PBS coverage of the flybys of Jupiter, and Saturn. At some point I wrote again asking for more stuff, but I got…
I spent a few hours today working on a video for Stage Right. I usually use Screenflow for my videos, but today for some reason I thought I’d try iMovie. Big mistake. Of the eight video clips I wanted to use in iMovie, seven seem to have imported properly, but the eighth has this little…
Before a school play, a principal worries parents will complain about all that lost test-preparation time. [T]his principal assumes I will be alarmed that my child takes a weekly visual art class, a dance class, and a music class. She is pretty sure I’m going to think there’s something fishy going on, that Real Learning…
“It is over three hours long, and it is like a cross between Noel Coward and The Terminator” – Ivor Benjamin describing the original version of “R.U.R.”Last Wednesday I went to see an adaption of Karel Čapek’s play “Rossum’s Universal Robots”, presented at the British Library. | There was one question from the audience that…
Of course, not all kids have tablets, and at least some of what the kids are doing on their tablets is watching videos. There’s only so much one can draw from a survey-based study, and much more that could be learned from a controlled experiment that actually gives kids the choice and reports what they…
Now, News Feed, at its most basic level, is defined by secrecy. Facebook doesn’t reveal exact details of the algorithms that determine what you see (and what you don’t) based on the company’s ever-evolving, ever-more-granular analysis of your preferences. And not just the preferences you explicitly set. Your likes, comments, clicks, even how long you…
It won’t make the afternoon of mowing more magical, but in the front lawn today I did find this mushroom fairy ring. Similar:Hermann Zapf, the font designer behind Palatino and Zapf Dingbats, has died at 96Hermann Zapf, the designer of fonts such…AestheticsI baked about 12 million vertices of steampunk control panel geometry into a flat plane…
I stayed up way too late last night playing 80 Days, a choice-based interactive fiction romp from Inkle . I had read all the glowing reviews, but kept putting off the purchase until I really had time to enjoy it. I started my first play through at about midnight, and was up past 3am. (I…
I just got this email from a student who graduated in May. I’m the adviser to The Setonian, the student newspaper. I think it’s safe to say that working with the Setonian helped me get the job. Several of the tests I took with the company involved me compiling given information into paragraph format, which was…
Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker who saved the lives of more than 650 children trapped in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II, died on Wednesday. He was 106… Working primarily on his own, Winton arranged safe passage for the group of mostly Jewish children, who were placed with foster families in the United…
“What answer do you want?” “Just tell me what you want me to write, and I’ll write it for you!” I once had a student in a literature class who almost had a panic attack when she found out, from the mock final exam, that the final exam would contain poems and prose passages that…
I had a similar experience, with a mentor who very rarely praised my work. But when he read my first full draft of my dissertation, and along with his notes told me to schedule my defense, I knew he wasn’t being polite or friendly or sympathetic — I knew he was treating me like someone…
Headline Capitalization Generator! Simple concept. Type your headline in a box. Invisible typing fairies will capitalize your words for you. One of the settings is for AP Style. You should probably actually learn the rules for capitalizing first, but this is a useful tool for checking. Similar:That "Top 5" countdown listicle stuffs 5 pages of…
Normally, students and teachers in Finland take a 15-minute break after every 45 minutes of instruction. During a typical break, students head outside to play and socialize with friends while teachers disappear to the lounge to chat over coffee. I didn’t see the point of these frequent pit stops. As a teacher in the United…
The conscious awareness of Comic Sans promotes — at least among some people — contempt and summary dismissal. But is there a typeface that promotes, engenders a belief that a sentence is true? Or at least nudges us in that direction? And indeed there is. It is Baskerville. Believe it or not, the results of…
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Apple is skilled at attracting praise. Often, it deserves that praise. This isn’t one of those times. […] For Apple to prove it truly stands with artists, Rabhan says, it would have to fundamentally change the way these contracts are negotiated, striking deals directly with the artists instead of music labels. Until that happens, he argues,…
Apple changes its plans, after initially intending not to pay artists during the three-month free trial of its new music streaming service. Three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing. I say this with love, reverence, and admiration for everything else Apple has…