Going Back to High School — 90 Years Back

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

How to Talk Nonsense

Last Friday, in my English 703: Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature class, the students and I spent 5 minutes talking nonsense.  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,

Horizontal Asymptotes

Back-to-School Special, Part I: Children’s Literature & Asymptotes

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

Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Offensiveness

Yes, you’ve all heard about NewSouth Press publishing Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer without the “n” word.  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

Procrastigrading; or, How to Grade Efficiently

Not That Kind of Doctor‘s delightful post on “The Five Stages of Grading” prompts me to share my own grading method: Procrastigrading.  While the word is a portmanteau of “procrastinating” and “grading,” I do not mean “put off grading indefinitely.”  Instead, give yourself a one-week deadline for each assignment (quizzes, exams, papers, anything), and begin

More Metafiction for Children

Since “Metafiction for Children: A User’s Guide” went up yesterday (as the final entry on In Media Res’ “Children’s Culture” week), I’ve been pleased by people’s kind response to my amateur video.  Thanks, everyone! There are far more books than I could include in the film, and there were several I had not thought of.