What happens in a literature discussion class is very different from what happens in a traditional lecture. In The College Fear Factor: How Students and Professors Misunderstand One Another (which I just finished reading this morning), Rebecca Cox describes what students expect of college instructors, such as the presentation of “informative,” essential facts and clear explanation…
Is Amy Chua a tiger mother, for forcing her daughters to practice music four hours a day, and denying them sleepovers? Â David Brooks thinks not:Â “Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls.” Chua is applying to her own…
When I teach “Intro to Literary Study,” I ask students to review their media consumption, and propose their own “media fast.” It’s not as simple as simply asking them to sign off of Facebook. For instance, I pointed out that I spend far more time on email than Facebook, so giving up Facebook would be…
Type professionals can get amusingly–if justifiably–overworked about spaces. “Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong,” Ilene Strizver, who runs a typographic consulting firm The Type Studio, once wrote. “When I see two spaces I shake my head and I go,…
This is my “Super Earth,” about 2.75 times the volume of our planet, orbiting very close to a wimpy Class M star. (Thanks for the link, Jefe.) Similar:Restoring the first websiteVery important bit of history. For a st…CybercultureHarvard Science Historian Publishes Results of Unprecedented 30-Year Census of Copernican …”Catholic church authorities were disple…HistoryAdded a splash…
One blogging convention that I really like involves making corrections by striking out mistakes, bolding corrections, and adding a parenthetical note or a footnote explaining the change. But when a journalist makes a mistake on Twitter, is it more ethical to delete the post entirely (thus keeping a mistake from spreading) or is it better…
(First published 27 May 2020, when I found it in my “drafts” folder.) In an article on consumerism in role-playing computer games, Garrelts explores a history that leads back to Adventure and Zork: “At this stage, while there were objects that could be manipulated that had use-value, there were no developed economies; in fact, there…
My students are usually captivated by “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and every time I teach it I get a paper or two with a thesis that argues the narrator’s husband is sexist, that the rest cure is demeaning, and/or that the narrator speaks for the author. That’s a bit like “proving” that the river is important…
Spooftacular stuff, from ladysisyphus. What are the plot-threads that clutch, what subplots grow Out of this pulpy rubbish? Son of James, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only Your third-person limited perspective, where your adverbs breed, And the caps lock gives no shelter, the chapter no relief, And the seventh book no sign…
Yesterday, my eight-year-old said, “I don’t like math, but I’m good at it.” This is a huge improvement from the math-related tug-of-wars we’ve encountered almost daily for the past year and a half. Yesterday, she also finished a “Star Wars Math” game, where the idea is to play a Trivial Pursuits style game, spaced-out versions…
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child…
How did it go? Similar:Do television and electronic games predict children’s psychosocial adjustment?Wow… what a drab, unquoteworthy, unsou…AcademiaThe Trouble With Online EducationI’ve taught an online “Video Game Cultur…AcademiaApple's iPad turns 5: Has it lived up to Steve Jobs' 2010 keynote?[Jobs] was right to leave out the produc…BusinessIn December 2001 I was blogging aboutIn December 2001,…
I first watched it on an iPod, so I didn’t see the translations, but I actually kind of liked it better when I couldn’t understand what the kids were saying in French. That left me feeling as isolated from them as they feel from the gadgets they are investigating, which in turn made the uncanny…
I recently updated a handout I first created in 1998. A phrase like “a good policeman knows his duty” unnecessarily excludes women. While it would be excessive to read history as if every general use of “man” is sexist, today’s culture calls for alternatives. Using “police officer” instead of “policeman” is easy, but replacing every…
Similar:Making progress.PersonalMaking Interactive Fiction Mainstream: ReadersJon Ingold describes the gamelike storyt…AestheticsLooking in on the officers' wardroom (conference and dining) one deck above the main … I thought of the interior as “Missisip…AestheticsSettling in for a jukebox show (not my favorite genre but the Go-Gos are fun).PersonalMoonBot is back. This time he fights a new adversary.…
Filing this for the next time a student proposes a paper that uses “The Yellow Wallpaper” to “prove” something about postpartum depression. Here’s Google’s Ngram for “postpartum depression, “rest cure” and “Yellow Wallpaper” from 1870-2000. Similar:How’s newsgathering during COVID-19 at the state level? Depends on the governor.Journalists covering state responses to …CultureBREAKING: British Burn Washington…
In 2003, when I chose MovableType for a institutional weblog, WordPress was a plucky but under-powered alternative. Until very recently, WordPress was only able to manage a single blog per installation, which meant that each blog user would also be a blog administrator.  Since I was trying to form a blogging community, not training blog…
The grammar/punctuation flames from not-all-that-well-informed posters at the end of this article are quite interesting for he or she who likes such things. Four years ago, I wrote an essay for The Chronicle Review cataloging “The Seven Deadly Sins of Student Writers“–the errors and infelicities that cropped up most frequently in my students’ work. Since…
Great little story from robohara.com. This morning for Christmas, I got a box from Dad. Inside the box was a treasure chest. The treasure chest was wrapped twice with a chain, and the chain was fastened with a combination lock that uses letters instead of numbers. Also inside the box was this: A map. Similar:Once…
I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning today, teaching myself something called “normal baking” in the computer modeling program Blender. I did it because I had nothing else pressing to do, I was too wound up to sleep, and too tired to do anything really productive. I wouldn’t say it was boring,…