From an old blog posting, something that seems just right for teachers to turn into a mantra here at the start of the school year:  We habitually underestimate our students. We habitually underestimate our students. We habitually underestimate our students.

Former Marine Tyler Boudreau writes about recovering from the psychic wounds of combat: They say war is hell, but I say it’s the foyer to hell. I say that a lot. I say coming home is hell, and hell ain’t go no coordinates. You can’t find it on the charts, because there are no charts.…

One definition of being educated might be this: Knowing the story your culture likes to tell itself well enough to be able to make up your own mind about it. Being able to make an informed decision about the story your culture likes to tell. If you can’t accomplish that basic move, you’re trapped in…

…were these: Can the university hope to escape the forces of change that have imposed themselves so disruptively on journalism? Or must the university too learn how to earn its authority in a new way? Judging by the ways I hear people talking about social media on campus, this new set of tools is seen…

I’ve been reading and listening in and watching the work of Jay Rosen this summer, as he continues to collaborate with Dave Winer and others on the problem of reshaping journalism for the challenges of our time. I’d like to jot down some of my mental notes and see what they look like. I take…

In a celebration of the career of the late literary critic Richard Poirier, Alexander Star addresses the tension central to literary language, and perhaps many other uses of language as well. A writer struggles with and against the meanings that have gone before: In painstakingly close readings, [Poirier] showed that poets like Robert Frost and Stevens and…

There are just under 1400 posts over at the earlier blog, Weblogs in Higher Education, which focused on pedagogy and the web. As good as the blogging software was, pMachine is feeling a little behind the times, so I’m going to start a new project here under my own name. Also known as…

Archives: June 2003 [source] Mon Jun 30, 2003 A well-known writer Here is an anecdote passed along by Annie Dillard: A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know . . . . Do you like sentences?” The…

Archives: May 2003 [source] Sat May 31, 2003 Foucault on getting a life In an interview, Michel Foucault reflects on self-knowledge and making something of yourself: I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not…

Archives: April 2003 [source] Wed Apr 30, 2003 Experiment on the last day of class: advice to next semester’s students Today in W130 I asked students to give advice to next semester’s students, as a way of starting to experiment with the idea from Sunday’s post. # I asked for their advice about how to…