Some people are getting overly worked up about this study, showing a high correlation between machine scoring and human scoring of certain writing tasks. Some of it is glee from people in the university-hating media set; there’s also some rending of garments by those in the humanities who love nothing more than the excuse to […]
Continue reading →I’m excited to say that I’ll be teaching a learning community of first generation college students next semester. (That is, students whose parents did not attend college.) Most people don’t associate that demographic with educational disadvantage the way they do with low socioeconomic standing and racial minorities. In fact, first generation college students suffer on […]
Continue reading →I could, if I felt like it, take this latest anti-university screed from the Atlantic apart. Laura McKenna’s piece is one of the most tired, cliched articles I’ve read in years, a collection of the classic warmed-over complaints about ivory towers and uninterested professors. It works purely on argument by assertion, speaks only in generalizations […]
Continue reading →So you can file this one away as random, picayune, pointless, of interest to almost no one, etc. Years ago, when it came out, I read the book The Gatekeepers by Jacques Steinberg. The book was an (at the time, anyway) unprecedented look inside the admissions process of an elite college. I read it for […]
Continue reading →“’I ended up with a dream job,’ he says from behind a desk decorated with a massive grizzly skull and a glass statue of a bear. But the last few months had been more like a nightmare.”– Jessica Grose, in a cliche so pure I almost wonder if its some sort of code
Continue reading →Pop culture has become inescapable. I have no historical context with which to compare the current dominance of pop culture in our media, so I will restrict my consideration to its status today. I can only say that, if you consume digital media at all, you read about pop culture. Sites and publications devoted specifically […]
Continue reading →So a Wired post in “A Geeks Guide to the Galaxy,” I think by David Barr Kirtley, and a post on SyFy Channel’s official blog by Marc Bernadin, both quote Michael Chabon insisting that writing professors are biased against genre fiction in general and science fiction in particular. “I had a lot of shameful, cowardly […]
Continue reading →via Flickr user Amalia D
Continue reading →I’m with those people who feel that certain protectors of the essential term and idea “irony” often go too far. Certainly more things are ironic than the most cautious of its policemen are willing to entertain. But still, there’s a whole subset of bad writing that is plagued by an almost defiantly poor handle on […]
Continue reading →Serial pedant and curmudgeon Jonathan Franzen has come out against Twitter, and engendered the typical reaction. I don’t agree with Franzen on almost anything, despite our shared anti-Twitter stance, and would not define Twitter’s problems in the same way as Franzen. As is so often the case, it strikes me that the counter-arguments are more telling than […]
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