Teaching
I have taught college-level writing since 2004, including academic non-fiction, poetry, and composition theory.
on failure
Rather than saying merely that failure is “okay,” I think comp/rhet teaches two related but different things about failure: that it is inevitable, and that it is interesting.
Transparency as Obscurantism (on gift-giving, performance, and pedagogy)
Last week marked the annual cusp between my birthday and my wife’s, a week which often includes Father’s Day – as it did this year – and so I’ve been thinking a fair bit about gifts, both given and received. In particular, I’ve been thinking about gift certificates, as they were out in a particularly …
on the MLA, citations, and digital literacy as modern language
Further evidence for Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s titular premise in They Say / I Say: regardless of inspiration (which has not been lacking since my last post), it sometimes takes the provocation of another person’s writing to actually prompt me to dust off my keyboard and wade into the fray. In this case, it’s …
teaching: the secondary primary
The following paragraph, from right around the middle of today’s First Person column over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed, strikes me as almost Palin-like in its illogic. (Though it is, admittedly, thankfully, handled far better syntactically than the erstwhile governor can generally manage.) Typically, research earns promotion and tenure. Teaching is secondary, and often …
on mean means, and what a mean might mean
Since reading this unsurprising-but-still-upsetting article at chronicle.com, I’ve been thinking about the whole business of C as an “average” grade. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Even granted that the average – construed as the arithmetic mean – isn’t *technically* the middle grade of a set (that’s the median), it’s still …
