It looks like it's the off-season for you all. No new posts in over a month? Well, those of us who are gainfully unemployed don't get time off.... um....

Anyway, if you're looking for a light read to take to the beach or whatever, check out the June Atlantic, which has a fun (?) little article about teaching Basic Writing and Intro to Lit:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/college

I'd love to hear what people think of this. And I'd especially love to read your responses in letters to the Atlantic next month.

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001212.html hola a todos me llamo mcest

As per usual, my post has little to do with pedagogy, except that today I discussed the content of the post in the class I teach.

That said, I found David Kirkpatrick's article for the New York Times Magazine compelling and insightful. Though I usually spend my time on NYTimes.com assiduously avoiding Stanley Fish's column, I was surprised to see my own home state the subject of...analysis? Scorn? Condescension? Such is the plight of a Kansan.

My students just turned in their first paper of the semester, and they are so clueless. How I wish I could laugh heartily at the mistakes and outlandish statements in student compositions, the way Anne of Green Gables does. Instead, I get mad. Real mad. First at the students, and then at myself.

I recently saw the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon. In fact, I've seen it twice, and I wish I could take my students on a field trip to view it. I found so compelling their strategy for responding to the recent, ongoing rumors that the moon landing was a hoax. First they showed countless interview clips with Apollo program astronauts, carefully edited and placed to present a coherent narrative about the experience. They also mixed in tons of footage of the various moon landings.

Hello world! And thank you to Blogging Pedagogy for the chance to participate in their community. I'm looking forward to... well, looking around.

The title of this post is pretty vague. In fact, its haziness reflects my knowledge (or lack thereof) of the 2008 candidates in the ring so far. As someone who's trying to figure out which candidate to vote for myself, is there some online resource (or print resource, I suppose) where I can refer my students who are curious about these hopefuls? I mean, is there a specific place where reliable information can be quickly obtained?

I prefer to grade essays in a random order, so that people with last names near the end of the alphabet don't necessarily get graded last. I also like my list to be truly random, and I hate doing it with dice. So I wrote a neat little list randomizer using random numbers generated by random.org. The randomness comes from a computer in Dublin which records static from a radio tuned to an unused frequency and extrapolates an unpredictable stream of binary from that.

The upshot is I've made a web page where you can type in a list of names (or anything really) and have it rearranged into a random order. Here it is. I hope you find it useful. If anyone is interested, I can provide source code.

While Lawrence Lessig doesn't take any particular stance on Al Gore's film in this blog entry, he does note an interesting occurence of "Godwin's Law." Godwin's Law, according to its wikipedia entry, states that:

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

The Fox News clip that Lessig links to on his blog notes that a conservative pundit likens Gore's film to Goebbels’ propaganda. And thus we have a metaphor in which Al Gore sits next to the Nazis.

I keep waiting for something catastrophic to happen in my classroom, so I'll have something interesting to post on this blog. So far, though, the semester seems to be ending not with a bang, but a whimper. Recently, however, I have noticed a strange trend. Three times in as many days, when I've mentioned to people that I'm a graduate student teaching a college class, they've eyed me strangely and asked me if I have any plans to teach high school. Now the strange-eyeing element of this could be paranoia on my part, but why is everyone so quick to mention teaching high school? When they ask, they make it sound far more logical than continuing to teach in a college setting.