One of the books I recently got from What the Book? was Between Heaven & Hell by a fellow named Peter Kreeft. The concept of the book is a dialogue between three famous men who all died within hours of one another on November 22, 1963: Aldous Huxley, John F. Kennedy, and C.S. Lewis. Well, now, it’s supposed to be a lively and informative dialogue between three men are actually figures for three positions: JFK is modern humanism, Huxley Eastern pantheism (at least, as understood by a Westerner), and C.S. Lewis stands for mainline Christian Theism. However, the book is …
Month: December 2004
Scrawled in a Student’s Notebook
I opened one of the students’ portfolio packets tonight and laughed and laughed. She’d submitted her personal notebook, as I’d specified students do—I don’t know why, I guess I was planning on quickly perusing their note-taking and whatever in-class exercise work was done outside of the journals when marking them on class participation. Anyway, in this notebook was scrawled, on the first page, in neon pink, the following phrase: MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!~ This was an admonishment I made to the class on the first day. I was warning them that a writing class …
Woo-hoo!
Other than the somewhat disappointing experience of finding blatant plagiarism in one of the essays submitted in my writing class, I’ve had a pretty good day: I got a little writing done on my ghost story in the morning, and I’m now at over 120 pages of material. My ghosts are verging on arriving in Pyongyang, which means I’m probably about halfway to finishing the story, or maybe a little less. I watched the first episode of the old TV show Battlestar Galactica and I am not really interested in watching the rest, but I kind of vaguely got why …
An Open Letter to a Plagiarist, With Extra Thoughts On The Side
I’m home today, working through the monumental task of marking the essays and journal work of my students in my writing class. Of course, this is all the evaluation that they’re getting all term—while I provided feedback in class during writing exercises, I simply wasn’t provided with enough time to mark assignments along the way. Still, I noticed who among the students dug in and tried during in-class assignments, and who usually wasted an hour staring at a blank page, embarrassedly writing nothing and saying only, “It’s very hard” to me when I asked why he wasn’t trying. Well, the …
Unexpectedly…
Alley Cat! You’re a wheelin’ & dealin’ kind of catwho not only has the unique ability to takethings in stride, but let it be known you’resmarter than you look. What kind of cat are you? brought to you by Quizilla What? More silly quizzes in the extended Entry, click the link below to see them all.
a pic…
Here’s a pic Lime gave me clearance to post, from our Autumn wanderings. Awww, ain’t it sweet? Yeah, yeah, I know, shut up, Gord. Anyway, click on it to see a little more detail. Oh, by the way, this is also a reminder to myself to get cracking and post some of the many, many photos I have sitting around on my hard drive. I am hoping to get that done in the next couple of weeks, but final exams take precedent to everything else till my grades are handed in.
My Future Lives
This week, the question is mine, and for once it’s pretty short: If you could choose five nationalities to be born into in your next five lives, which ones would you choose? Now, having said this, it’s pretty hard to think five lives into the future. You know, it’d even be hard to choose my next life strategically. So I guess I’m going to do the reverse of what Kim Stanley Robinson did in exploring history, and I’m going to make up a future history in which my future lives are played out. Future Life 1: A Brit during the …
The Big Test: Suicide and Educational Reform
Jeff, over at Ruminations in Korea, has a very interesting and informative (and saddening) post about the pressures on kids writing the Uni entrance exams in Korea, and the suicides related to it. All I have to add to it is that not only does the nature of this form of University admission create a ton of unnecessary pressure, it also atomizes students and forces them to reject the idea of cooperative learning, a pattern that stays with them for a long time (I see it in my Uni classes all the time). Not only that, but it (along with …
Emuling TV and movies…
Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on things: working on my ghost story, working on camp stuff, testing students, and marking essays. So after days full of these things, I feel like watching some shorter things than movies. Let alone Bollywood movies, even standard Hollywood or Korean movies are long for me at 2 hours. Of course, I’ve watched a few films lately; notably, the Bollywood movie Devdas, starring Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai, and Madhuri Dixit—a great movie, though it’s really, really long, and quite miserable at the end. Why do true lovers sometimes fail so …
Simon World’s Roundup
Just a reminder: even if it’s blocked on your school server, as it is on mine, the roundup over at Simon World is always worth checking out. Simon linked to one of my posts on this one, and he’s got a more recent one out here. Via Simon World I was led to Jodi’s page and a very interesting post about the Asian practice of “saving face”.