Purely by coincidence, I was reading Virginia Woolf”s A Room of One’s Own during the week that the first woman became the presumptive nominee for a major political party in the U.S. In 1928, when Woolf gave a series of lectures on “Women and Fiction,” she described the differences in … Read More
Author: Kate Stover
“Why couldn’t she be more like his other teachers, who looked at him blankly the following fall when he said hello to them outside Woolworths, having in a matter of months forgotten his existence entirely?”
No contemporary writer is better at convincing the reader that a person with many faults can be a hero than Richard Russo. His mixture of empathy, honesty, warmth and wit made Sully a heroic figure in Nobody’s Fool and makes Doug Raymer the equally-unlikely hero in the sequel Everyone’s … Read More
“Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.”
Adrienne Rich was a revolutionary. As Margalit Fox wrote in the New York Times, Rich “accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at … Read More
“If we do not consciously and intentionally seek to change the norms in our classrooms, we are likely to find ourselves . . .with students paying only civil attention.”
Sociologist Jay Howard notes that in 1976 researchers Karp and Yoels distinguished between students who paid attention from students who created the appearance of paying attention, which they termed “civil attention.” If you ever had a hard time getting a discussion going in class, it may be because the students … Read More
“The perennial question of motherhood, Eloise thought, was how honest to be.”
“But we did not feel as if anything we said was a lie. We both believed that the real lie was told by our present unworthy circumstances.”
The “truth” looms large in Tobias Wolff’s memoir A Boy’s Life. He tells us, for example, how he hijacked the school application process by creating fake transcripts and letters of recommendations when he applied to schools out East. He describes two types of truth – things he knew were true, … Read More
“The growth mindset is based on the belief in change.”
I’m coming to the realization that it’s not a lack of ability that holds most students back: their beliefs about their abilities hold them back. Carol Dweck calls their beliefs “mindsets.” She says that students have either a “fixed” mindset, which says they can’t get any better because they are … Read More
“I often watched the Southern Cross in the night sky, but it was not just a compass bearing I needed now, it was a judgment about what would be the moral path to choose.”
More than an account of her journey from a sheep-farm in Australia to graduate school at Harvard, this memoir explores the reasons for her decisions with frankness, even-handedness, and intellectual rigor. Jill Ker Conway left her country “. . . because I didn’t fit in, never had, and wasn’t … Read More
“Listening and questioning are the basis for positive classroom interactions that can in turn shape meaningful collaboration, which can then build a culture of thinking.”
To increase learning in the classroom, don’t focus on curriculum or using new “tips and tricks” for instruction. Instead, Ron Ritchhart, a researcher at Harvard’s graduate school of education, writes that we should change the “culture” of our classrooms by making “thinking valued, visible, and actively promoted in all … Read More
“We were motivated by our conviction that education, properly understood, is the process of cultivating creative and curious minds.”
Many textbooks for first-year college students take a “here’s how” approach to writing outlines, developing thesis statements, and citing sources. The authors of Habits of the Creative Mind begin with a much different premise. They believe that the focus should be on “nurturing curiosity, creativity, and the other allied habits … Read More
“Each night I sat on the porch and wished for some surge of feeling, some firelit stream of sound to lead me away from all that I had known.”
Can you love a poem that you don’t understand? I think this question divides the poetry-reading public into two camps: those who prefer Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, and Ted Kooser on the one side, and those who prefer poets such as Mark Strand on the other. In his 1998 Paris … Read More
“I had had a dream, and that dream was a warning of what might happen to me if I rejected what I’d been and who I was.”
“A blog post, a personal essay, even a full-length memoir, is not about stuffing in as much as you can; rather, it’s about illustrating something correctly.”
Just because it happened, doesn’t make it interesting, Marion Roach Smith bluntly observes in this short book on writing memoir. What makes it interesting? Roach Smith’s answer to this question sets her book apart from other textbooks on this topic. She advocates focusing on a universal theme, such … Read More
“Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.”
“Learning to participate in discussion is a lifelong learning project, and most of us go to our graves feeling we still have a lot to learn.”
However, as authors Brookfield and Preskill note, that “doesn’t mean that we can’t get better at creating the conditions under which good discussion is more likely to occur.” We can increase the odds of being successful by planning carefully, having realistic expectations, and being willing to monitor closely its value … Read More