One of the books that I drew inspiration from during my teacher preparation days was How 2 Gerbils, 20 Goldfish, 200 Games, 2000 Books, and I Taught Them How to Read by Steven Daniels. His first year of teaching in an inner city school was a disaster. But he learned from it and became a […]
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My mom likes to tell a story about a letter she received from the state of California following her decision to keep me out of the public school system when I turned six years old, electing instead to become my teacher herself. She wrote to the education department requesting specific guidelines for keeping me on
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This sentence tightening video features a workshop on improving sentence-level clarity. The workshop includes discussions on the active voice, removing prepositional phrases, proper comma usage, avoiding redundancy, and so on.
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When the poet and critic Ezra Pound issued his famous literary proclamation to “make it new,” he uttered a phrase that became so identified with modernist literature that it’s difficult to imagine modernism happening without it. Of course, like many fitting pronouncements, over the years this one’s become a cliché, having been extensively quoted and
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“Every good manager effectively threatens his players with professional extermination if they don’t give him the best effort that they are capable of giving; Casey Stengel, Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog and Earl Weaver are masters at it, as was Durocher. They are not nice people. . . .” – Bill James, The Bill James Baseball
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To Be or Not to Be? If someone asked me to tell the story of my life, I might begin like this: I was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1942. I have been told that my father came home from the hospital saying over and over, “It’s a boy! It’s a boy!” There is no
First Aid: The Bones of Freshman Composition Read More »