- fdeboer AT purdue DOT com
Blog RSS Feed
Recent Blog Posts
Categories
Category Archives: Education
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Education, Prose Style and Substance
1 Comment
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Education, The Discipline
4 Comments
Spring 2013 Classes
This coming semester (which begins on Monday, eep!) will be my last required set of courses. After this spring, I’ll have completed my five core courses, finished two secondary areas, and taken my linguistics requirements. I will still take classes … Continue reading
Posted in Education, The Discipline
Leave a comment
new book, new assignment cycle
It’s a little funny to be getting excited about a semester that starts in late August, but I’ve ordered my textbook and crafted my syllabus for next semester. And I’m getting very excited. First, I’m excited to teach with The … Continue reading
Posted in Education
Leave a comment
something else is probably going on here
As a mere consumer of journalism, I tend to think that what’s necessary in journalism isn’t just an adversarial attitude but a universally adversarial attitude, that is, skepticism towards all parties in a given dispute. That doesn’t mean that you … Continue reading
Posted in Education, The Discipline
2 Comments
resource on the first person for students
A webtext I wrote for the online journal Writing Commons has survived the peer review process and been published. WC’s webtexts are designed as resources for students to develop their writing and multimedia compositions; mine considers the effective use of … Continue reading
Richard Fulkerson’s Four Axiologies
I’m going to tell you a story, or really, a paraphrase of someone else’s story. Richard Fulkerson, a compositionist and Professor Emeritus in the Texas A&M system, wrote a series of controversial articles (over a span of decades) that traced … Continue reading
a validity problem, not a reliability problem
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Education, Tech Stuff
Leave a comment
my learning community
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Education
3 Comments
the Atlantic‘s war on the university
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Education, Popular & Digital Writing
4 Comments
Michael Chabon went to college a long time ago
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Education
23 Comments
