language + rhetoric
C.S. Lewis and the Great Divide
C.S. Lewis via last.fm
Recently, I’ve been reading as much of and about the British author C.S. Lewisas I can, as you can see from my Amazon reading list in the right-hand sidebar. My original reason was to inform myself as I will teach two of his Narnian stories next academic year. I found Selected Literary [...]
Book Notes – The Shadow University (2)
Following on…
Catherine MacKinnon and Stanley Fish… are explicit in their disdain for the First Amendment’s absolutist and noncontextual approach. In her influential book Only Words, MacKinnon, a feminist legal scholar at the University of Michigan, introduced her chapter “Equality and Speech” with the blunt statement that “the law of equality and the law of freedom [...]
The Answer Sheet
Scenes from the Battleground’s Twitter feed points me to this Washington Post article: The Answer Sheet – teaching without gimmicks.
Except for the misguided notion of targeting learning styles, none of these techniques is wrong in itself. But together they raise a barrier. Instead of bringing the subject closer to the students, this heap of [...]
Why I don’t read newspapers
Image via Wikipedia
More specifically, I don’t read opinion pieces. Here’s an example of why I don’t. In the Dec. 24th edition of the Financial Times, Harry Eyres wrote in a piece called Human beings or human resources?
… the Enlightenment project of raising human reason to god-like power has had disturbing results. These can be seen [...]
“What we have here is a failure to communicate”
Image via Wikipedia
In a recent issue of Journalism Communication Monographs was an article about Japan, or rather about how Japan is viewed by American magazines. It was entitled “Seeing themselves through the lens of the other: an analysis of the cross-cultural production and negotiation of National Geographic’s “The Samurai Way” story”.
Thinking that I might perhaps [...]
Other people’s lives, or Carlin and Nock
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Do you read autobiographies? I read a lot of books, but autobiographies is not a genre that has attracted me much for most of my life. At a certain stage of his life, my dad read and recommended autobiographies to me . I remember one. It was the autobiography of actor Dirk Bogarde [...]
Work till you drop… it’ll stave off Alzheimer’s!
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Well, well. First we get this reminder from the Telegraph (reminding us of who is really working for whom) and then barely two weeks later, this from the BBC:
Keeping the brain active by working later in life may be an effective way to ward off Alzheimer’s disease, research suggests.
There’s a silver lining to [...]
Autumn at Sheffield Park Gardens, East Sussex
Autumn at Sheffield Park Gardens, East Sussex
Originally uploaded by Anguskirk
In a November 4th article in the Daily Yomiuri, Mike Guest wrote about marked language: “phrases like, “Japan’s four seasons” instead of the seasons, or “American joke” for any joke told by a foreigner. Marked by redundancy. ”
Many Japanese will insist that Japan is unique [...]
futab (new word)
Just learned a new word, thanks to a photo on Flickr. and the urban dictionary.
Literacy vs digital literacy = fundamental vs derivative?
The Literacy Test for Immigrants
Originally uploaded by beautifully_broken762
A fellow blogger and teacher of history in the UK, Doug Belshaw, is working on his Ed.D. and his thesis is on digital literacy. I’m sceptical about “digital literacy” being touted as some completely new kind of animal, unrelated to “literacy”, and after groping for the right [...]
