A “miscreant” is a person who behaves badly or in a way that breaks the law.
See number 6. In fairness, it can’t be easy being a radical lefty in the wilderness known as Ohio. He’s also a diehard Ohio State football fan so he’s still reeling from the Wolverine ass whupping.
Put all that together and I’m gonna let it slide.
One noteworthy thing he sidesteps, he could never substack like that in China.
When his friends rip him for what they perceive to be an unusually lax job, an egghead professor friend of mine likes to joke that “The life of the mind is 24/7.”
A very successful writing friend of mine once told me that “if you don’t think about your current writing project when you first wake up, something’s wrong.” I’m fascinated by the subconscious which I think of as the nearly continuous internal dialogue I have with myself.
Sometimes I can write a medium-long, (hopefully) substantive blog post in 20 minutes only because subconsciously, I’ve been sporadically working on it for days in my mind. Sometimes even, while asleep.
In one first year writing conference a student of mine described her pre-writing process on one paper this way, “I talked about the prompt a lot while driving around with my friends and then my dad and I really got into it.” For which she received historic levels of extra credit.
Of what does your internal dialogue consist? Are there patterns or themes? What shapes your subconscious? For me, it’s a combination of things I read, watch, and listen to; reflections on interactions with people past and present; and then staring at the Cooper Point coastline of the Salish Sea while nursing my morning latte.
If your subconscious has atrophied as a result of not exercising it enough, maybe you should give this a go.
Source: @AwesomeLibrarians
One-on-one conferences with my first year writers are a wrap. At the end of our convos I asked what most contributed to their learning and what if anything I should tweak going forward.
We ended up liking each other, so the feedback was almost universally positive. One recurring theme was, “We sat in a circle and you were part of the circle.”
When the classroom architecture makes it possible, it’s pretty simple isn’t it? Ditch rows. Ditch hierarchy. Ask challenging questions. Listen. And whenever possible, laugh.
In preparation for tomorrow’s writing seminars, I’m rereading old final papers to select a few to share with my current students who are writing their fifth and final ones of the semester. In short, the final paper is a self-assessment of the progress they’ve made throughout the semester.
One former student wrote:
“This course has had a profound impact on the way I think about writing and life. I have become a stronger conversational writer with more confidence in my abilities, and I have been encouraged to continue writing outside of an academic setting. Now I really enjoy informal writing: I am planning on writing an op-ed in the Mooring Mast (the school newspaper) and am even applying to work at the Writing Center at Professor Ron’s suggestion. Without his support, I would not have had the confidence to make that decision.”
Thanks to their elementary, middle, and high school teachers; and parents I presume; about a third of my first year students have really high ceilings as writers. And over the years, I’ve gotten better and better at helping them realize their writing potential. I do it by telling them they’re amazing. While they’ve earned good grades throughout their lives, they’ve received very little or no meaningful and specific praise. The good grades don’t add up to much over time and many of them lack confidence.
I make a boatload of electronic comments on every paper. Some are suggested revisions, but many others are smiley faces, comments like “really excellent paragraph” and “nice insight”. At first their insights are sentence-long, now they come in waves of paragraphs. I always end with a long comment where I highlight their clearest strengths and next steps and often conclude by telling them how much I enjoy reading them. Upon returning papers, I follow up in class with praise for their last writing effort and positive examples of their improving work.
Those are some of my ways of telling them not that they’re “A” students, but that they’re amazing young adults. Pete Carroll, of the 3-8 Seahawks LOL, refers to it as “relentless optimism”.
Like my students, we lack confidence that there’s anything amazing about us. We could change that if we started telling family and friends what we most appreciate about them.
The Good Wife is grieving the loss of her mom and dad. Last night, in an attempt to cheer her up a wee bit, I told her she had been an amazing daughter to them for the last five years. She replied, “I have?”
I couldn’t believe that she was too close to it and too hard on herself not to see how amazing she had been. Flying to see them in Central California repeatedly, moving them to Washington State, and then putting her life on hold for the last year as their needs grew exponentially. Lovingly and completely selflessly caring for them to the end almost by herself.
It wasn’t her fault that she wasn’t sure she had done enough. Because no one had told her she was amazing.
Good grief it took me a long time to finish this book. Had to renew it at the local library three times. My students are to blame for that. Yesterday, finally, I eschewed football and dusted off the last 90 pages.
Truly excellent. Radden Keefe pulls off an amazing feat. He takes complicated topics including pharmacology, corporate maleficence, the law, and philanthropy among others and makes all of them imminently understandable for someone of my intellect. Deserves a Pulitzer.
As a writer, he reminds me of a savvy, veteran quarterback who “takes what the defense gives him”. When it comes to word choice, he always checks down, always choosing the simpler word and phrase in the interest of clarity. I found myself rereading some sentences twice not to better understand them, but to marvel at the cogent prose.
In terms of the content, I find the “Sackler family-Mexican drug cartel” analogy convincing. Spoiler alert that you already know if you read the news, the Sacklers largely get away with their crimes against humanity. Well worth the read anyways. Just don’t dawdle like me.
Next in the queue.
In this day and age of unregulated social media algorithms that inflame our most negative instincts, how cool is it that one online community is making a concerted effort to do a hell of a lot better.
It doesn’t even matter that LinkedIn couldn’t detect the self-deprecating nature of my recent “Liberals Are Hypocrites” post. Their algorithm probably stopped at the offensive title and didn’t proceed to the body of the post that read, “Like me.” Or maybe it did scan those two words, but wasn’t able to detect my intended meaning.
It’s all good LinkedIn, I wholeheartedly applaud your efforts even if I was wrongly caught up in your decency dragnet.
LinkedIn’s Learning Center does a great job explaining their ground rules. Here’s a taste:
Hey Zuckerberg, Dorsey, et al., here’s a fourth “Be”. Be like LinkedIn.
Truly excellent.
More than you prob want to know about it.
The first two submissions are from the same Slate article:
The semester is in full swing. Time to raise your game.
Six very short episodes totaling three hours. Final grade, ‘A’. It’s the story of a newly appointed Chair of an English department at a fictional “near Ivy”. The larger stories are the corporatization of higher education, the declining status of the humanities, and the rising tide of social media-based groupthink among (many) students.
The filmmakers hit the elderly/senile/tenured faculty especially hard and it’s always hilarious. Sandra Oh is excellent as the besieged Chair, but her adopted daughter may be even better. Kids are usually filler, but she’s a complex, edgy, thoughtful human just in smaller form. Other filmmakers take note.
The contrast between the young hip prof and the one well past his expiration date missed the essential element of excellent teaching—the degree and thoughtfulness with which students engage directly with one another. Had I consulted, I would’ve recommended substituting more poetry class-like dialogue for the Hamilton-like performance which was far fetched. Partial credit for that vignette though because with the exception of this all time great teaching film, t.v. and film teachers are almost always center stage.
We don’t go to sporting contests to watch coaches. We don’t go to symphony concerts to (just) watch composers. So why do filmmakers take us into classrooms to primarily watch and listen to teachers? The answer of course is because way, way too many teachers talk way, way too much. And that teacher-centered model has seeped into our consciousness to the point that it’s rarely questioned.
Postscript: Clearly, no sophomore slump for Ted Lasso. Still so well written. A wonderful mix of intelligence, humor, and humanity.
Pressing Pause 