education and the failure of procedural equality
I wrote a piece for Medium on our educational debates and their importance for maintaining our national myth. Check it out.
Continue reading →Author: Freddie
I am happier than I have ever been
Jordan Weissmann of The Atlantic asks why people are in humanities graduate programs in spite of very bad job numbers. First, I suppose I should say that my program is in a small subfield within the larger world of English, which has much better numbers generally than English writ large, and that my particular program has effectively […]
Continue reading →any (USB) port in a storm
I’ll never forget when the original Xbox was announced. There were howls from the Apple crowd, at a time when they actually were the underdogs that some still pretend to be. “Microsoft’s trying to take over everything! It’s monopoly! One company should not control so many products!” Flash forward to today, and Apple releases a broader range […]
Continue reading →do we want perfect inter-rater reliability?
In the social sciences and empirical humanities, it’s frequently easy to envy the directness of measurement that characterizes some work in the natural sciences. Because so much of what we measure in topics such as education, psychology, or sociology are incorporeal, it can be tempting to join a field where you can measure things in […]
Continue reading →the Pavlovian internet
It’s not unusual to hear people wonder aloud about why certain behaviors that are rarely encountered in the physical world are encountered in online interactions. I believe a big part of the answer to that, and one of the keys to understanding online culture altogether, lies in the way in which social approval is made […]
Continue reading →for the record
I want to say that the efforts by Mitch Daniels to abridge academic freedom are a massive embarrassment for our university, a clear indication of his dedication to advancing his conservative ideology from his position as president, and a terrible warning about what he intends to do in his tenure. Even if he has not […]
Continue reading →Endorsement: Mechanical Keyboards
I very rarely do this sort of thing, but I wanted to take a moment and endorse mechanical keyboards. The difference between mechanical and standard membrane keyboards is articulated and demonstrated visually in the video above. I personally have a Rosewill RK 9000i with Cherry MX Blue switches, maybe the most tactile kind, which was […]
Continue reading →Mary Soliday’s Everyday Genres: A Review
Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments Across the Disciplines, by Mary Soliday, Southern Illinois University Press, 2011. Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines (WAC and WID) represent both opportunity and challenge to traditional writing programs. Opportunity, because they can demonstrate the value of our research and the expertise of our instructors to other parts […]
Continue reading →Confession: I don’t take notes
Here’s a fact about me and my writing process that I have long hidden from teachers and peers: I don’t take notes. Ever. I remember way back in sixth grade when my shame first came to light. In my school district, you attended K-5 at one elementary school (and how I wanted to stay there […]
Continue reading →Summer Academic Goals
This summer promises to be a heady time for me. I’ve been setting aside money for some time, so that I might be able to live this summer without having to work. I’m doing so because I’m taking my preliminary exams at the end of July. I can’t believe coursework has come and gone so […]
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