A Fine Line

“Attributes like confidence, enthusiasm, and likability can be perceived in the briefest of exposures.”

December 15, 2016

In The Spark of Learning, Sarah Rose Cavanagh describes a study where students were asked to rate professors after seeing 30-second videos of lectures that had no audio. The students’ ratings predicted with surprising accuracy the professors’ actual end-of-semester evaluations. It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise … Read More

“There’s work to be done, there are plots to be plotted, there are scams to be scammed, there are villains to be misled!”

December 8, 2016

This may be Margaret Atwood’s greatest masterpiece. In Hag-Seed, she retells Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” by turning it inside-out and adding a layer. It’s a play within a play within a novel. This restructuring results in a hybrid form of story-telling that’s actually very funny. In her … Read More

“Bernard Shaw said you should try everything once except folk dancing and incest.”

December 1, 2016

This is how Michael Billington, “the” British theater critic, who has reviewed more than 9000 plays over the last 50 years, begins his piece on “Oedipus the King” by Sophocles. Charming, gossipy, insightful, authoritative, knowledgeable, and passionate, Billington is a great writer. It’s hard to … Read More

“To look closely with the attention of questioning changes everything.”

November 26, 2016

“It is,” Jane Hirshfield writes in this collection of essays about poetry, “if undertaken fully, revolutionary.” More stimulating than a triple-shot of espresso, these essays show what can happen when a great poet sets out to describe how poetry is primarily “an instrument of investigation and a … Read More

“If anything has been learned from this century of research on learning, it is that learning is not one thing but many things.”

November 17, 2016

What I love about this book is its informed and nuanced contribution to the “lecture vs. active learning” discussion that has been bubbling up for some time now at college campuses. The authors say that decisions about teaching methodology must be based on learning outcomes. This isn’t … Read More

“The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.”

November 10, 2016

I predict that this opening sentence of Ann Patchett’s new novel, Commonwealth, will become one of those classic opening sentences that creative writing instructors refer to when talking about creating tension right out of the gate. Who is Albert Cousins? Why did he bring gin to … Read More

“You need to develop some social skills. Some tact, some restraint, some diplomacy.”

November 3, 2016

To mark the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Hogarth commissioned “today’s best-loved novelists” to retell “the world’s favourite playwright’s” dramas. Anne Tyler’s novel Vinegar Girl is based on “The Taming of the Shrew,” a play that Tyler said she hated because it’s “totally misogynistic” and … Read More

“What was consciousness other than the surface of the soul’s ocean?”

October 27, 2016

In a Paris Review interview, Jesse Barron observes that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s work is “so aesthetically forceful as to be revolutionary.” What makes it revolutionary is Knausgaard’s goal to write “as close to life as possible” even if it means “breaking” the form of the traditional … Read More

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

October 20, 2016

Much like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, this collection of elegant essays by the poet Mary Oliver is for those who “are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.” It’s a guide for dreamers – … Read More

“If we are not fragile, we don’t deserve the world.”

October 13, 2016

The poet Naomi Shihab Nye is an expert on how fragile the world can be. She is an Arab-American who grew up in Ferguson, Missouri and Palestine. Perhaps she has never taken “safety” for granted. She describes how knowing “how desolate the landscape can be” has … Read More

The 10 Best Books for College Teachers — Part 2

October 6, 2016

My list of the books that have sparked the biggest changes in how and why I teach continues this week. What are your favorites? Share your recommendations in the “Leave a comment” box below or email me at CStover1@madisoncollege.edu.

6. For those who are looking for … Read More

The 10 Best Books for College Teachers – Part 1

September 29, 2016

As a college teacher who spent many hours during the last ten years reading books, articles, and conference proposals on the art and science of teaching, I believe that the best books for college teachers are the ones that provide a new framework, new research, or new … Read More

“Yet we now know that a brief distraction can help when we’re stuck on a math problem or tied up in a creative knot and need to shake free.”

September 22, 2016

After having read my share of books about learning, I was initially reluctant to read this one because a reviewer said it is a “gift to guilt-ridden slackers everywhere.” Fortunately, it’s the review, not the book, that is misleading about the effort learning requires. How We … Read More

“All was artifice.”

September 15, 2016

Can a 20-year-old character study still be relevant? In the case of this essay by New Yorker writer Mark Singer, which one British newspaper said offered “clearer insight into the mind” of Donald Trump than the longer biographies, my answer is yes. After spending several months … Read More

“And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rise up from the depths of time.”

September 8, 2016

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, perhaps the most dog-eared book on my shelves, doesn’t give advice on writing poetry. Instead, it’s what Einstein –his contemporary — might have written if he had been a poet. Compare the Theory of Relativity to this statement: … Read More

“Attributes like confidence, enthusiasm, and likability can be perceived in the briefest of exposures.”

Like this:

“There’s work to be done, there are plots to be plotted, there are scams to be scammed, there are villains to be misled!”

Like this:

“Bernard Shaw said you should try everything once except folk dancing and incest.”

Like this:

“To look closely with the attention of questioning changes everything.”

Like this:

“If anything has been learned from this century of research on learning, it is that learning is not one thing but many things.”

Like this:

“The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.”

Like this:

“You need to develop some social skills. Some tact, some restraint, some diplomacy.”

Like this:

“What was consciousness other than the surface of the soul’s ocean?”

Like this:

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Like this:

“If we are not fragile, we don’t deserve the world.”

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The 10 Best Books for College Teachers — Part 2

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The 10 Best Books for College Teachers – Part 1

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“Yet we now know that a brief distraction can help when we’re stuck on a math problem or tied up in a creative knot and need to shake free.”

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“All was artifice.”

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“And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rise up from the depths of time.”

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