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Category Archives: Teaching Literature and Writing
The Future Fascists Fashion
“I try to imagine the world, our society, if the [school] privatizers get their way. Kids will be sorted by race, religion, and ethnicity, never interacting with anyone different from themselves. The homeschoolers will know only what their parents know. … Continue reading
Posted in Ed Reform, Politics, Teaching Literature and Writing
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On Putting Powerful Tools in Unskilled Hands: Two Egregious Tendencies in Contemporary Poetry
NB: Several of the examples I use in this essay come from various essays by Randall Jarrell that I read years ago in my own wayward youth. If this were a scholarly piece, I would track those down and footnote … Continue reading
Posted in Poetry, Teaching Literature and Writing
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What K-12 Textbooks Are Like Now: A Sample lesson on the Declaration of Independence
[Begin lesson.] We hold (Did you know that Thomas Jefferson invented an automatic letter copying device? It’s pictured here. Higher-Order Thinking: how are letters different from email?) these truths (Cross-curricular Connections–Math: Truth tables are used in logic. Al-Farabi, pictured here, … Continue reading
Posted in Ed Reform, Humor, Teaching Literature and Writing
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Two Late-night Thoughts about Poetry
Two thoughts, tonight, about poetry First, a theory of poetry and how it 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 poets, I … Continue reading
Posted in Poetry, Teaching Literature and Writing
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Learning Theories, Models, and Techniques
NB: The following are all either instructional design models or can be adapted to create or at least to inform instructional design models. The list is far from complete, and the definitions are necessarily brief and so, in many cases … Continue reading
On Learning that Hopkins Meant to Destroy His Own Poetry
for Diane Ravitch The great historian of education (and generally great all-round person) Diane Ravitch has written that her favorite poem is one by Gerard Manly Hopkins. So, I wrote this for her, about Hopkins, in Hopkins’s own style. The … Continue reading
Posted in Poetry, Teaching Literature and Writing
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The Promise of Ed Tech
Ed tech companies are, of course, trying to take advantage of the pandemic to sell politicians and administrators on replacing teachers with educational technology. So, thought I would try my hand at writing some ad copy for these companies: Help … 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
How the Common Core Distorted and Dumbed Down Instruction in English
For many decades now, as in any occupied country, the Deformer/Disrupter occupiers of U.S. education–the invasion force that went forward, financed by Gates and Walton dollars, to take over our federal and state governments, has dominated discourse about education in … Continue reading
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