Connecting with the Boy

Today my son asked me to take him shopping for his favorite foods. He’s tired of fast-food take-out. I told him I was busy today running the spotlight for and videotaping yet another one of Carolyn’s performances (this time her voice teacher’s summer revue).
The poor boy has been left at home a lot while the rest of us did so much theater over the summer. He competed in a chess tournament last week. I fell asleep in the next room. He came in second place. (I have no pictures. I’m a bad father.)

How Different Cultures Understand Time

Business Insider calls this article an “anecdote… provided by linguist and cross-culture studies expert Richard Lewis.” The article provides several direct links to other works by Lewis, including an Amazon link for his book and an advertisement for the services he offers to businesses. The article makes many unsourced claims, and assumes that all Americans…

‘Thought Leader’ gives talk that will inspire your thoughts

Saving this for the next time I assign an oral presentation. Now that doesn’t sound important, and it’s not. But if I repeat it three times, I’m making you believe that it is important… Let’s look at a picture of the planet for no reason …. Slowing my speech, lowering the volume of my voice, by…

Clickbait writers hate this English professor’s time-saving trick!

Defeat clickbaiters with this one weird trick! You won’t believe how punctuation can save you time. Will you regret clicking that headline phrased as a question? (You can safely avoid clicking any headline phrased as a question, promises an emotional reaction, or hedges a claim with “may” or “could be”. You won’t miss anything important if you don’t click that bait.)

An Experimental Autism Treatment Cost Me My Marriage

Interesting essay challenging the notion that medical difference equals pathology. With Children of a Lesser God, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, “Flowers for Algernon,” “Cathedral,” The Glass Menagerie, The Miracle Worker, and The Sound and the Fury, I can see putting together a special topics literature course on pathology and pathos…

The dangers of ‘character education’ in universities

As the authors depressingly note, “the UK is one of the most economically unequal of the rich countries, and closing many of the gaps we describe will require systemic change beyond the scope of this report”. Well, quite. And herein lies the problem with teaching young people that through sheer vim and vigour they can…

Why are we so bored?

On average we spend six to seven hours in front of our phone, tablet, computer and TV screens every day. All this is simply becoming boring. Instead of performing varied activities that engage different neural systems (sport, knitting, painting, cooking, etc) to relieve our tedium, we fall back on the same screen-tapping schema for much…

The problem I just learned about calls for tea in the big mug.

Similar:Topics in Am Lit: August Wilson — Online J-Term course starts Dec 16.PersonalOriginal Mickey Mouse Character Enters Public Domain in 2024As a grad student in the 1990s, I chose …AcademiaFrisbee is a brand name, but how newsworthy is that?What would you do? Today I wrote 192 …Academia#Gamergate—and what it means for gaming in educationGamergate originally…

Charismatic People Don’t Obsess Over What they Can’t Control (Tony Robbins)

Saving this for the next time I teach Death of a Salesman, in which Willy misunderstands what makes a person “liked.” Summary: charismatic people don’t obsess over what they can’t control. Instead, they focus on what that they can do. Similar:Jane Eyre and the Invention of the SelfThose who remember Jane Eyre solely as r…BooksToday's Computer Displays…

“People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,” making his economic message resonate with “fed up” blue-collar voters, says Trump observer

No actor says “My character does this and says that because he is evil.” How many voters wake up in the morning saying, “I support this candidate because I am evil, stupid, and/or racist”? Nobody votes “against women’s reproductive rights” or “against unborn babies.” Those are labels provided by the opposition, not the identity claimed…

We Are Hopelessly Hooked [on our Gadgets]

We check our phones 221 times a day—an average of every 4.3 minutes—according to a UK study. This number actually may be too low, since people tend to underestimate their own mobile usage. In a 2015 Gallup survey, 61 percent of people said they checked their phones less frequently than others they knew. Our transformation…

This image of Mark Zuckerberg says so much about our future

A billionaire superman with a rictus grin, striding straight past human drones, tethered to machines and blinded to reality by blinking plastic masks. Golden light shines down on the man as he strides past his subjects, cast in gloom, toward a stage where he will accept their adulation. Later that night, he will pore across…

Rey is not a role model for little girls (major spoilers ahead)

The headline is silly clickbait — of course Rey is a role model, but not *just* for little girls. Aside from that, Mike Adamick writes lucidly and passionately about a key scene in The Force Awakens. Very important if there are young girls in your life, or if you are interested in the relationship between…

CNN Holds Morning Meeting To Decide What Viewers Should Panic About For Rest Of Day

Kicking around ideas ranging from an uptick in child kidnappings to a new link between laptops and cancer, senior CNN staffers held their regular daily meeting this morning to decide which topic viewers should panic about for the rest of the day. —The Onion Similar:How The Language Of Special Education Is EvolvingThe words we use…

Students don’t know what’s best for their own learning

Many educators worry that students are more positive about teachers who give better marks regardless of what the students learn, and are more negative about teachers who make students work hard in order to learn. If this is true, it means the simplest way for a teacher to get a good evaluation is to make…

Every conversation between a parent and a child, in four conversations. (Slate)

This whole item applies very well to one of my children. Me: Put your shoes on. Child: Did you know that we don’t actually vote for president, we vote for people who vote for president? Me: I don’t care, put your shoes on. Child: I am. Me: You’re not. Put your shoes on. Child: Why do we have shoes anyway? Me: Just put your…

Employers Will Hire You For: 1) Leadership; 2) Teamwork; 3) Writing; 4) Problem-solving 5) Work Ethic (NACE 2014)

What do employers say they are looking for in new hires? Do they want drones who are good at following instructions and memorizing the “right answers,” who like working by themselves so their perfect grades aren’t threatened by the unpredictability of group work? No. Here’s what employers do look for: Leadership experience Ability to work…

How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus

It can be scary outside the box. A university is a box that people choose to enter. It can be scary in there, too. I don’t feel like I’m doing my job as a professor if I don’t make students feel at least a little uncomfortable. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses…

Dani Girl (Geyer/13Players)

Dani Girl (Geyer Performing Arts Center, Oct 1-3, 2015) When Dani, a precocious nine year old, loses her hair to leukemia, she embarks on a magical journey to get it back. Simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking, Dani Girl is a tale of life in the face of death, hope in the face of despair, and the…

Thoughtful PopCult Analysis of ‘Peanuts’ Deserves Better than a Clickbaity Headline Hating on Snoopy

On a shelf in the slanty room under the stairs, next to her college textbooks, my mother kept a stash of inexpensive Peanuts paperbacks — dozens of them, which reprinted the newspaper strips, perhaps on a yearly basis, maybe more frequently. I spent many a summer afternoon reading through those books, and I remember sorting…