Let’s start with this idea: linguists do not designate any language as being superior. And yet, when I teach my students to write academic essays in “standard” English, I am in fact telling them what language I believe is superior. Baker-Bell argues that “standard” English is a construct created by … Read More
Month: June 2021
“Resistance is not about laziness, lack of will power, or the failure of intellect and imagination.”
Instead, it’s about neurology and psychology, Rosanne Bane argues in her book about the resistance that nearly all writers experience at some point. She explains what happens in our brains when we have trouble writing. As a writing teacher, I have been experimenting with ways to support the writing process … Read More
“It seemed to me that if I could stir, if I could move to take the next step, I could go out into the poem the way I could go out into that snow.”
Were my reading assignments interesting? Moving? Inspiring? These are the questions I ask myself after teaching literature classes. I hope my students will experience the sort of engagement that Eudora Welty describes here. She writes about spending an afternoon in the library reading Yeats and feeling so absorbed by the … Read More