In the New York Times: Gail: You may be right that the big issue for America now is class, not race or gender. But in this presidential campaign, gender rules. Really, sex rules. Who’d have thought? David: Class is gender. Specifically men. [emphasis mine] The wage stagnation and inequality stories are largely stories about how badly […]
Continue reading →This awesome Language Log post, which includes some audio examples and waveform data, reminds me of how I often used to get confused about the phonetics-phonology distinction. These are both among the major branches of linguistics, along with syntax, semantics, morphology, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. (Fun activity: get a bunch of linguists together and ask […]
Continue reading →In recent decades, advances in eye tracking technology have made eye movement studies practical, non-invasive, and precise. Computers outfitted with sophisticated eye tracking equipment can record and analyze the movement of a subject’s eyes with great precision, giving us a tremendous amount of data about eye movement and vision. The traditional qualifier is that, while […]
Continue reading →“A normal educated adult speaker of English has an active vocabulary– i.e., words that he actually uses in everyday speech– of about 30,000 words. A speaker makes the the right choice from among those 30,000 or so alternatives not just once but, in fluent speech, continuously two to five times per second– a rate that […]
Continue reading →This is the sort of thing that I should learn to just keep to myself, but here goes. The just-released issue of Research in the Teaching of English (46.3) has a study I really admire, “Placement of Students into First-Year Writing Courses.” (In the unfortunate custom of academic articles, the PDF is gated, though an abstract is available here.) […]
Continue reading →Which isn’t, I’ll hasten to say, a big problem. Last week, I was invited to a bull session about a new, tablet-based ebook version of a writing textbook. The publisher had asked the authors to get creative with brainstorming; they feel, as do the authors, that e-textbooks have not really begun to explore the possibilities […]
Continue reading →Astra Taylor has written a response to the piece by Dana Goldstein that I referenced in my last post; Conor Friedersdorf has responded to both Goldstein’s piece and mine. Both essays are worth your time and interest. Update: Goldstein follows up.
Continue reading →Dana Goldstein is one of my favorite policy and political writers working today, and this response to the recent n+1 piece on unschooling is a good example of why. Goldstein is fair, measured, and diligent with her citations, while at the same time quite critical in her effect. It’s a great piece. (Astra Taylor’s piece […]
Continue reading →“I do indeed say that writing is artificial, and maybe one of our divergences is due to my not having explained that I do not consider being artificial necessarily bad at all, but rather of itself good. Nothing is more human than artifice. Only human beings can make products that are truly artificial–extensions into the […]
Continue reading →As someone who reads and writes a lot about American education policy, I often hear people assert that Montessori education is the secret weapon we could deploy to solve many of our problems. The people who say this are all well-meaning, and they are typically speaking out of personal experience, with a child of theirs […]
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