In North America, those of us who are teachers or students are thinking about school. In August and September, the summer holidays end, and a new term begins. To commemorate (or commiserate?) this season last year, I posted Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom: A Back-to-School Mix. This year, I’m posting a mix about language.  Enjoy!
What was high school like 90 years ago? This Newtown High School Handbook provides some sense of what it was like in Newtown, Queens in 1921, when Crockett Johnson (a.k.a. David Leisk) was a student there. No yearbooks from the Newtown class of 1924 (Johnson’s graduating class) survive, but plenty of things do: The Queens Public
A plea to end the war on education.
Last Friday, in my English 703: Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature class, the students and I spent 5 minutes talking nonsense. Â We’d been reading theories of nonsense, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books – I thought it would be both fun and educational to put those theories into practice. So, based on our readings of Tigges,
Yes, it might have made more sense to post this query prior to the new semester, rather than just after the term has begun. But my tendency to work close to deadlines means that the syllabus is never finished until just before the term starts. In any case, I’ll be teaching Literature for Children again,
Academically adrift? Nonsense. The real story is that humanities majors learn more.
In my decade of teaching Children’s Literature at the university level, I’ve learned a lot. But I never feel that I’ve learned quite enough to teach the grad class Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature. I’m grateful that I’m teaching it now and not ten years ago, but it’s one of those courses that makes me
Yes, you’ve all heard about NewSouth Press publishing Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer without the “n” word. Â But a couple of important points are getting lost in all the uproar. As Natalia Cecire points out on her blog, the “political correctness” circus-goers are missing the point. I find it more noteworthy that such Bowdlerization is
Not That Kind of Doctor‘s delightful post on “The Five Stages of Grading” prompts me to share my own grading method: Procrastigrading. Â While the word is a portmanteau of “procrastinating” and “grading,” I do not mean “put off grading indefinitely.” Â Instead, give yourself a one-week deadline for each assignment (quizzes, exams, papers, anything), and begin