The brilliant professor Mark Bauerlein scores yet another direct hit in a recent post about the value of those old-fashioned writing assignments: In my classes I include both types of assignments, short, one-page writings and longer 7-page papers (I rarely go over 10 pages these days, but I try to make the class have 25-30 [...]
Posts Tagged ‘writing’
The Value of Term Papers
Posted in Education, Language and Literature, tagged Mark Bauerlein, teaching, writing, writing process on January 25, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Me Quoted On Writing
Posted in Education, tagged effective teaching, teaching, technology, writing on January 3, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
A couple of months ago, a student at my school came in and asked my opinions about student writing. I thought she was just writing for the school newspaper, but a couple of weeks ago her story ran in the local paper, the Las Vegas Review Journal. It’s quite good. She got some good material [...]
Scrutiny in Teaching Writing
Posted in Education, Language and Literature, tagged English, National Review, teaching, writing, writing process on November 5, 2011 | 3 Comments »
A post at National Review, and some great follow up comments from readers, offers some great ideas about teaching writing: The only way to address writing is to give line-by-line feedback. We cannot assume that students know what good writing looks like. Every time students pass a written assignment at any level with subpar writing, such [...]
Words and Music
Posted in Arts, Language and Literature, tagged classical music, Guardian, modernism, music, novels, writing on October 20, 2011 | 1 Comment »
A fascinating and wonderful article ran in the Guardian last week. The author eloquently ruminates over the parallel evolution of literature and music in the 19th century, and laments a perceived divergence since the 20th. His descriptions of the intertwined nature of the two media are divine: To read Molly Bloom’s great gush of resigned affirmation [...]
Evolving Media
Posted in Arts, Language and Literature, tagged blogging, film, Internet, theater, writing on June 9, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Watching an old silent movie this week inspired an analogy. In the early decades of film, the acting was exaggerated because the actors were trained for the stage–they were playing to the back row of a theater. It wasn’t until we adjusted to the nature of the new medium that people started to use it in a more productive manner (thank [...]
A Response to The New Yorker About Writing and Literature at UNLV
Posted in Education, tagged effective teaching, New Yorker, teaching, UNLV, writing on June 7, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
The New Yorker just ran an excellent essay looking at some thorny educational issues: why do so many people go to college today? Are they getting much out of it? Should college be different? The author sympathetically looks at different angles to these issues, and addresses recent ideas and research on them. At one point, though, [...]
On Teaching Writing Vs. Teaching Literature
Posted in Education, tagged composition, editing, English, reading, revision, teaching, writing, writing process on May 31, 2011 | 1 Comment »
A couple of notable essays have appeared recently about focusing on teaching writing, as opposed to literature. Here are a few money quotes, starting with the original piece in Salon: It’s hard to blame anyone for not wanting to teach writing, which, while it might not involve manual labor or public floggings, is hard, grueling work. Often [...]
School District Employee Writing FAIL
Posted in Education, Politics and Society, tagged CCSD, writing on May 18, 2011 | 5 Comments »
So, since it seems yours truly won’t be picked up for a regular summer school job this year, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks planning what else to do. I emailed the substitute teaching department of my school district to inquire about subbing opportunities for summer school. I fully expected to get a reply [...]
Why I Blog
Posted in Living well, tagged blogging, Living well, writing on January 23, 2011 | 1 Comment »
There are four main things that keep me going here. In order of their importance to me: 1. Journaling. I began this blog primarily as a novel way to juice up my journaling habit. Though I rarely include here the kind of overtly personal information we associate with journals, I usually do write about things [...]
“I Defiantly Agree!”
Posted in Humor, Language and Literature, tagged English, language, writing on January 21, 2011 | 2 Comments »
As often as students commit the typical errors of writing—the fragments, the missing punctuation, the misspellings—there is one very specific mistake that I see dozens of times every year that nobody else seems to have mentioned: it’s using the word “defiantly” in the wrong place. Over the years, I’ve had endless students write down and [...]
Let Readers Discover Your World Through the Protagonist
Posted in Language and Literature, tagged Harry Potter, The Matrix, writing on December 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Here’s an example of the kind of writing rule I was just talking about: let’s say you’re inventing a rich, complex new world as the setting for your story. There will be a lot of details that need to be introduced and explained to readers, and you need to know how to do it. There [...]
What’s Wrong–And What’s Right–With Student Writing
Posted in Education, Language and Literature, tagged effective teaching, language, reading, revision, teaching, writing, writing process on November 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Last week I got a reading-response journal from a high school freshman in my honors class, about an excerpt from Plato’s dialogue Crito (which I’ve described and quoted here before); her paper started off like this: From Cristo was written by Plato. This story talks about this guy named Socrates whom was sentenced to presin for [...]
The Use and Abuse of Parts of Speech, or, Why Basics Are Important
Posted in Education, Humor, Language and Literature, tagged English, parts of speech, teaching, vocabulary, writing on October 28, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Finished reading example sentences my classes made up for a current unit of vocabulary words today. As usual, many of these sentences are complete nonsense. Don’t get me wrong: I’d say that more than 80% of them were just fine, and even though each class had done plenty of exercises with these words and researched [...]
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