The students who are, in the first few weeks, more interested in their handheld devices than in what I am saying in class are usually the same students who are failing the course around midterm. Access to these devices does not cause students to fail; rather, the student’s attention to the device is an outward…
Doing things correctly earns you points on an assignment, but English is one of those majors (I’d include the various arts on the shortlist) that encourages bold thinking, which leads to deeper learning. According to Steve Strauss, “Reading Chaucer, making sense of it, writing a term paper on it, and then being able to defend…
In between today’s various events, I dashed into the store for milk. As I was preparing to back out of my space, I saw a little old lady pushing her cart along, not realizing that my engine was running and I was about to back out. To make a long story short, I didn’t try…
This essay is yet another reminder of how I must work harder to try to teach my students the long-term value of what they learn in my classes. Students are so focused on the present — this semester, this course, this assignment, this rubric, this grade — that an assignment that requires critical thinking skills…
Freelance writers have to be entrepreneurial, sometimes taking jobs that don’t really interest them (but pay well, or offer good exposure). Noah Davis does the numbers, laying out what he does and how much he gets paid. I pitched and wrote constantly. I submitted invoices to between six and 12 outlets a month. But while…
Wisdom from science writer John Horgan. [I]t is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In your science, mathematics and engineering classes, you’re given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, “This is how things are.” They give you certainty. The humanities, at least the way I…
Journalist who helped saved Jews from Holocaust is on the path to be named a saint. An Italian journalist and father of seven, who helped hundreds of Jews to escape Nazi persecution, will be beatified on June 15 in the Italian city of Carpri.Odoardo Focherini who died aged 37 in the Hersbrueck Nazi concentration camp…
One of my most consistently rewarding professional tasks is recruiting good writers and helping them develop the managerial skills they need in order to be good editors. It’s faster and easier, in the short term, for experienced student journos to do all the work themselves, but far better in the long run to train up…
A human interest story about an early experiment in online journalism. Imagine a time when “owns home computer” is enough to identify a random talking head as authoritative. Look for the rotary telephone hooked up to an acoustic modem. News report from 1981 about the Internet. [MOBILE VIDEO]. Similar:“I don’t know how that Jerz guy…
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There will always be a public appetite for reporting on baseball, movie stars, gardening and cooking, but it’s of no great moment for the country if all of that work were taken over by amateurs or done by machine. What is of great moment is reporting on important and true stories that can change society.…
In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself…
Over 50 percent of humanities Ph.D.s who start out working in non-tenure-track positions make the jump to full-time, tenure-track employment in less than three years. Those who don’t make that jump, again, do what Ph.D.s have always done: Some choose interesting work in the business, governmental, or non-profit sectors, others in university administration. A few…
Can’t wait until we get this end-of-year state-mandated testing/evaluation over with, so my son can go back to reading stuff like this guy’s book. “Reality is structured to a series of moments so that anything that is real is real in a moment of time, and if something appears to persist in time, that’s because…
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Caps off to the Navy’s plan to drop all-caps. OFFICIAL COMMUNICATIONS AND ORDERS HAVE BEEN IN ALL CAPS SINCE 19TH CENTURY. YOUNG SAILORS ACCUSTOMED TO TEXTING SEE ALL-CAPS ORDERS AS A FORM OF SHOUTING! NAVY WANTS ITS ORDERS AND OFFICIAL MESSAGES TO BE MORE READABLE AND LESS RUDE. “WHILE THIS DECISION WAS MADE TO SAVE…
The headline is hype. How about “Lego faces are getting more diverse?” That would be just as true, and less misleading. Many of the recent sets come with heads that you can rotate — a happy face on one side, a scared or angry face on the other side. So it’s also true that Lego…
A former student who is now excelling in grad school took a moment to share her thoughts about my blogging portfolio assignment, which is usually 25-40% of a student’s grade. In April, a different former student who had blogged for me in several classes, whom I invited as a career workshop guest, surprised me by…
The word Michel de Montaigne chose to describe his prose ruminations published in 1580 was “Essais,” which, at the time, meant merely “Attempts,” as no such genre had yet been codified. This etymology is significant, as it points toward the experimental nature of essayistic writing: it involves the nuanced process of trying something out. Later…