Caring… Dead Grandmothers 9 Jun 20119 Jun 2011 We've been known to joke about it in faculty meetings: how many grandparents some students can lose in a single year. (And yes, we do name names.) Here's one professor's concerns…
Books… Rhyme Time 2 Jun 20112 Jun 2011 Children's book editors conventionally whine about rhyme. It's so hard to write tight in rhythm and rhyme, they'd rather not brave it. Then they have children of their own, and…
College… College Endeavor 1 Jun 20111 Jun 2011 With the final landing of Endeavor, this shuttle chapter of space exploration will be closing soon. At the moment, I'm closing a college quarter and identifying with NASA. I have…
Art Books… Books: Too Good to Die 14 Apr 201117 Apr 2011 True--you're reading this online and you probably read eBooks of some sort. But technology also expands the options for traditional books as well. Back in 2005, Valerie Kirschenbaum published Goodbye Gutenberg:…
Collaboration… Robo-Mottos 12 Apr 201112 Apr 2011 While witnessing my first FIRST Robotics competition this spring, I was initially impressed by the enthusiasm. It's a high school sport! Fans rock a basketball court while nerdish guys in…
Collaboration… Composing Language 11 Apr 20119 Apr 2011 Every time I see my composer son, he raves about and demonstrates some new tool in his repertoire: something about counterpoint, some chord he picked up from another composer, some…
Blogging… The Sport of Writing 9 Apr 2011 Some sports are played against the clock. Their time-centered rules vary greatly, but they include judicious use of the time available. Basketball rushes through its quarters with shot clocks to…
Books… Friday Flick: Do Schools Kill Creativity? 8 Apr 20119 Apr 2011 Sir Ken Robinson, author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative, and The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, spoke at TED a few years ago about…
Business… HBR on Hiring Humanities Majors 6 Apr 20116 Apr 2011 Second Road's Tony Golsby-Smith writes for a Harvard Business Review guest blog, "People trained in the humanities who study Shakespeare's poetry, or Cezanne's paintings, say, have learned to play with…
Academic Writing… Bilingual Brain Advantage 4 Apr 20114 Apr 2011 During the decade politicians were banning bilingual education, I was in graduate school studying linguistics, including language acquisition--even bilingual language acquisition--and wishing we could all have bilingual (or trilingual) education.…
Blogging… Halt! Who Goes There? 30 Mar 2011 I can't decide what to say to you today because I don't know who in the heck you are! When I teach students about the proverbial rhetorical triangle--how their ideas,…
Courage… Friday Flick: “If I Should Have a Daughter” 25 Mar 201125 Mar 2011 Between sharing two of her own polished pieces, poet Sarah Kay shares her own creative emergence and that of her students. She suggests listing ten things you know to be true.…
Gwyn Nichols 