Search Results for: metaphor
Teaching Metaphor (with Comments on Developing Curricula in the Age of the Thought Police)
“The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself.” –Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral … Continue reading
Combating Standardized Testing Derangement Syndrome (STDs) in the English Language Arts
The dirty secret of the standardized testing industry is the breathtakingly low quality of the tests themselves. I worked in the educational publishing industry at very high levels for more than twenty years. I have produced materials for all the … Continue reading
Essential Reading | Book Review
Diane Ravitch’s Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools In these dark days of Trumpism, reasons for optimism are the spars to which the rest of us, the passengers on the … Continue reading
How to Prevent Another PARCC Mugging: A Public Service Announcement
NB: Everything said of PARCC here applies, as well, to all the standardized tests in English language arts currently being used by state departments of education. In other words, PARCC is singled out, here, as an example of a general … Continue reading
The Initiation, or What Dana Did on Her Summer Vacation | A Short Story
This short story is about the Eleusinian Mysteries–a nine-day festival and initiation into the cult of the Earth goddess, Demeter. What happened during the initiation was the best-kept secret of ancient Greece. People were forbidden, under penalty of death, from … Continue reading
Unlearning a Western Pathology
The philosopher Peter Van Inwagen suggests that we humans are very good at physics and very bad at metaphysics and that this might be due to the ways in which our minds are constructed–that we might simply be blind to … Continue reading
Film
This is an outline that I made up for my Intro to Film courses. For more examples of film scripts and writing by Bob Shepherd, go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/film/ Film, Course Outline |Robert Shepherd Note: Emphasis throughout will be on applying … Continue reading
Four Short Essays on Reading and Writing Poems
On Reading and Writing Poems Some thoughts, tonight, about reading and writing poetry How Poetry Means Perhaps the most important lesson that I received, in college, about reading poetry occurred on a day when, in a class on nineteenth-century American … Continue reading
MONOGAMY: A One-Act Screenplay | Bob Shepherd
A holographic virtual classroom meeting on a lawn on Kizhi Island in Lake Onega, Russia, 2059 CE, the onion-shaped domes of the Transfiguration Church in the background. Thirteen students, attending via remote presence avatars, sit in a circle, their professor’s … Continue reading
On Grammar Nazis
My friends generally know that I’ve written a lot of textbooks over the years, some of them pretty thorough treatments of traditional English grammar and usage. So, I’m pretty good at that stuff. Despite this, I find myself being corrected … Continue reading
