Colleges keep complaining that students are coming to them unprepared. Instead of raising admissions standards, however, they keep accepting mediocre students lest cuts have to be made in faculty and administration. —Patrick Welsh —For once, blame the student (Yahoo!/USAToday (will probably expire)) This essay is written by a high school teacher frustrated by the lack of…
In complex reading passages, organization may be elaborate, messages may be implicit, interactions among ideas or characters may be subtle and the vocabulary is demanding and intricate. The ACT isolated reading complexity as a critical factor by analyzing the results of the 1.2 million high school seniors in 2005 who took the well-known ACT college…
In late 1982, my best friend had a Sony TCS-310 Stereo Cassette Recorder. Audio cassette tape was the affordable recording media at the time and one wintery November day while on our way to the arcade ‘Just Fun’ in Ithaca, NY, we came up with the idea to record video game sounds. —Daniel P. Hower…
The first fully-automated performance of the 1924 Futurist/Dadaist/Cubist composition “Ballet mécanique” by George Antheil takes place this weekend in the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, on the Mall in Washington, DC–in conjunction with the larges exhibit in history on Dadaist art. Programmed by composer/author/music technologist Paul Lehrman, and using robots built by…
My Half-Life 2 Mod, Week 2: Custom Textures, Glass Window, Tree (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) A week after I began a serious attempt to create a Half-Life 2 mod, I’ve made some good progress. Early last week, I did manage to add the hinged door that was the next thing on my agenda. I’d been going crazy…
“He’d tell us, ‘Now, 20 rows down, the accounting’s hard as granite — it’s the hardest thing an office man can stand,’” said Huddie Ledbetter, one of Peters’ former trainees, “‘but you keep your pencil sharp, and you keep your pencil working. It’s the life of a numbers-crunchin’ man.’” Sources say Peters, who was born…
To be a true Cookie Monster vocal, said Mr. Conner, who signed some of the subgenre’s biggest bands, including Sepultura and Fear Factory, “it’s got to be really, really guttural. It should sound like they’re gargling glass.” —Jim Fusilli —That’s Good Enough for Me: Cookie Monsters of death-metal music. (Opinion Journal) New to me. Similar:What…
By always placing the most recent version of its articles at a static URL, Wikipedia concentrates the power of its inbound links on a particular topic to a single URL. A reader searching for information on Hurricane Katrina who clicks through to Wikipedia from Google gets Wikipedia’s latest information on the storm and recovery efforts…
The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just one in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms. —Study: Few Americans Know 1st AmendmentYahoo!|AP) I’m blogging this with my students in mind (*fake cough sounding like…
I have noticed many people at fest, such as shopkeepers, pull out what they believe is their most formal language when the royalty visits them. This often means they struggle along with “thee/thou” in addressing the King & Queen when they should properly be using “you” (the phrase “Thy Majesty” doesn’t make sense, does it?…
According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males. —Roger Dobson and Abul Taher —Cavegirls were first blondes to have fun (Times Online) The authors conclude by stating,…
Judith Moran, director of the Math Center at Trinity College in Connecticut, “started life,” she said, as an art major. Now, like several of the faculty members questioned, Moran said she wants all students to be able to assess numbers in The New York Times. Trinity students also get their quantitative feet held to the…
The freeform world of both the Jazz Age and the DotCom explosion create surreal intoxicated hilarity, and both The Great Gatsby and The Sims allow the participants to immerse themselves in the experience. Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, affords us some distance from this world and critical insight into the excesses of this…
Student Reaction to Google Placement (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) While preparing for my Intro to Literary Study class, I thought that, since I introduced the “Claim, Data, Warrant” concept last week when I was very sick, I’d better revisit the topic to make sure the presentation was effective. I Googled claim data warrant (without quotation marks) and…
My Half-Life 2 Mod Begins (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’ve finally knuckled down and started making a serious effort to teach myself how to create a Half-Life 2 mod. A “mod” is a user-created expansion to a commercial game. Perhaps the most famous of these is Day of Defeat, a total-conversion mod that turned Half-Life (a sci-fi…
—Ex 1-4c: A Clever Blank-Verse Entry on Your Blog (Intro to Literary Study (EL150)) I know they’re only doing it because I’ve made them; still, it thrills me every time My students write in blank verse on their blogs. Similar:Jane Eyre and the Invention of the SelfThose who remember Jane Eyre solely as r…BooksKitchen utensils for my steampunk…
With a few clicks of a mouse, Pleasants can navigate the Web site for Goochland County’s Byrd Elementary School and access the Web log kept by her daughter’s third-grade teacher, Ellen Robinson. As all Goochland teachers have been required to do this year, Robinson keeps a school district-sponsored Web log, or blog — a kind…
Dr. Jerz, Hello, this is Jenna O’Brocto. I am currently student teaching at Southmoreland High School, and I am responsible for teaching two journalism classes. I was very apprehensive about this assignment, since I have only taken one journalism course, but I wanted to commend you on the amount of information I was able to…
In the 15 plays classified as tragedies, there are 13 definite and 8 possible suicides, ie, a total of 21 incidents for evaluation. Among the 13 overt suicides, at least 7 are depicted as being admirable under the circumstances at the time. Also, in various ways, 4 of these 13 were assisted, and at least…
Lecturing is So Much Easier than Leading a Discussion (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m still shuffling along with a virus (or whatever it is that’s laying me low). I trudged into the classroom and plopped into a chair in the front of the room, which felt very unnatural to me, since I like moving around during class.…