When teachers catastrophize, I generally tend to not buy in. When my colleagues complain about the latest bureaucratic stuff we’re expected to do, I figured you just ride it out. When somebody starts going on about how the students are getting dumber every year, or worse every year, or more feral every year (post-Covid fallout […]

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Quick!  Pop-quiz, hotshot: Where does the thesis go in your students’ essays?   Go ahead and answer out loud.  The FBI agent watching you through your camera will let me know what you said. I’m kidding, of course, I don’t need Phil to tell me what you said.  You said “End of the intro paragraph.”   Well done.  […]

The other day a student asked me a question. Very quiet kid, been in my classes for 2 years, and 95% of his contributions have been smiling and nodding. Then, with no context, he asked me, “What do you think is going to happen to books?” I had many responses, but asked him to elaborate, […]

We spend a lot of time talking about modes of writing. What kind of writing is it? Informative? Persuasive? Rogerian? Definition? Narrative? We also spend a lot of time in our education system not teaching creative writing, which is – to use a pedagogical term – cuckoo-bananas. “Hey, you know the thing that’s great about […]

In rhetoric, there is something called “affect transfer.” Usually used in visual composition, it’s when you generate an emotional response, and then immediately put it with something to which you’d like people to connect the emotion. In writing, it’s a simple matter of sentence structure. Visually, we tend to be drawn to the center of […]

“This Is Just To Say” By William Carlos Williams I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox   and which you were probably saving for breakfast   Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold   This is Just To Say… Under no circumstances eat The plums That are in The […]