Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking helps anyone involved in education think about priorities and assumptions, about how we approach the work that we do. It is not a nuts and bolts book; it is a book that zooms out more than it zooms in. We need such books, because some of […]
I’ve just finished attending the 2019 International Virginia Woolf Conference, a marvelous event focused this year on questions of Woolf and social justice. Most (but not all) of the attendees were affiliated in some way with academia, and one of the questions that recurred through the conference was: How do […]
Another day, another report of an independent bookstore … doing pretty well. After some apocalyptic years, indie bookstores have been having something of a resurgence. This warms my heart, but it has also got me thinking about what, if any, lessons there are for higher education in the perhaps surprising, […]
The other day I explained to a student that the “cc” field in emails is a holdover from the days of typewriters, when a “carbon copy” was literally a copy made with carbon paper. Similarly, “dialing” a telephone number (and then “hanging up”) or “taping” a show. And of course […]
This Inside Higher Edarticle about a particularly punishing course syllabus is extreme, but many college professors have policies that are only slightly less extreme, though they may not think of them that way, may not think of them as particularly punishing, certainly don’t think of them as cruel. (I used to have […]
1. I survived high school by reading books about education. My mother worked at the local college and was using her tuition benefit to do an M.Ed. Often, I accompanied her to the library. High school was tough for me for all sorts of reasons, not least being that I […]