“It tells the stories of two revolutions.”

April 20, 2017

Revolutions, indeed. This book is about Revolutionary War era hero Alexander Hamilton, whose picture is on our ten-dollar bill.  It’s also about the revolutionary way his story is told by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who uses hip-hop, harpsichords, and a largely non-Caucasian cast in his Broadway production of … Read More

“Until recently, we simply didn’t know how immense this problem was, or how serious the consequences, unless we had suffered them ourselves.”

April 13, 2017

When Matthew Desmond was growing up, money was tight.  Sometimes the gas got shut off, and his parents eventually lost their home to foreclosure. This week, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his nonfiction book Evicted, which is about eight families in Milwaukee and their evictions. Vivid … Read More

“It comes over him in a wave: He’s been wrong about his Tempest, wrong for twelve years.”

April 6, 2017

Anyone can retell as classic story, but changing a play by Shakespeare while remaining true to the themes and lessons of the original requires skill. Changes were needed, Margaret Atwood told a standing-room-only crowd in Madison, Wisconsin this week, to  make Miranda (the daughter who grows up … Read More

The students felt that a few could carry the discussion for the rest of the class . . .

March 30, 2017

. . . while the majority of students adhered to a ‘norm of silence’ – not perceiving themselves as obligated to participate in the conversation (50).  Jay R. Howard, a sociologist, calls this the norm of “the consolidation of responsibility,” which tends to be the default setting … Read More

“What’s past is prologue”

March 23, 2017

At first glance, this line from Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” suggests that history repeats itself.  This view is written in stone – literally – on the base of the National Archives’ sculpture.  The Harvard Gazette and the University of Chicago Magazine use this quote in articles … Read More

“Always do what you are afraid to do.”

March 16, 2017

This famous assertion from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Heroism,” published in 1841, floated to the top of my mind while – of all things! – attending a technology conference. The keynote speaker, author of the upcoming book Strive: How Doing the Things Most Uncomfortable Leads … Read More

“My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion.”

March 9, 2017

That the poet Walt Whitman was a rebel who celebrated democracy, nature, love and friendship is well known.  What isn’t well known is that Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb who assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, felt inspired by Whitman. Let’s think about that. Could it be that … Read More

“It was impossibly large and full of beauty and danger in equal parts – and we wanted it all.”

March 2, 2017

Paula McLain’s novel The Paris Wife describes Hemingway’s earliest years as a novelist writing in Paris after WWI from the perspective of his wife, Hadley. It’s a wonderful novel, set in one of the most dynamic literary periods, where James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude … Read More

“By and large, art both instructs and entertains us.”

February 23, 2017

George Anastaplo continues “It instructs us partly by entertaining us; it entertains us partly by instructing us.  We are likely to learn from that which amuses us; we are likely to enjoy that which seems to teach us something” (1).  This collection of essays is written not … Read More

“The world is too much with us.”

February 16, 2017

Two-hundred years ago, when William Wordsworth published the poem that begins with the line quoted above, critics were not impressed.  In fact, they ridiculed him for using the words “of the common man” instead of using a scholar’s proper poetic diction.  Wordsworth sparked a revolution. It … Read More

“Many modern books on ‘style’ have suggested that there are only two styles: good and bad.”

February 9, 2017

This book, Clear and Simple as the Truth, takes a much different view.  The authors argue that there are many styles for writers to choose from – including contemplative, classic, romantic, plain, oratorical, practical, and diplomatic.  This book focuses primarily on the classic style – its … Read More

“Researchers found that students who wrote prolifically before high-stakes performances, like examinations and final papers, significantly improved their performance on their final work” (69).

February 2, 2017

Interestingly, in this study by Ramirez and Beilock (2011), as summarized by Gary R. Hafer in Embracing Writing, it didn’t matter whether students wrote about the subject matter or about their emotions and anxiety – what mattered was how frequently they wrote. Hafer makes a case … Read More

“Every work of literature has both a situation and a story.”

January 26, 2017

The situation, Vivian Gornick explains in this book about the art of personal narrative, is the context or circumstances, while the story is “the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say” (13). Gornick argues that the most difficult and important work of memoirists is … Read More

“Can you tell a story that doesn’t begin, it’s just suddenly happening?”

January 19, 2017

In each of the six short stories in this collection, which won the 2015 National book Award, things suddenly happen on the first page: there are no descriptions of the setting, no background information.  Instead, the story seems to be already happening.  In an interview, author … Read More

“This all sounds very messy”

January 12, 2017

What I’m looking for – perhaps what we’re all looking for – are learning principles that are most likely to lead to long-term retention – even if they’re messy. In Small Teaching, Jim Lang describes a learning principle called “interleaving” that requires two things: spacing out … Read More