In this blog post I’m going to touch on an issue of personal significance to me, so forgive me if it becomes somewhat vehement in tone. It’s subject is the punctuation sequence [“.]! To clarify, the sequence I am referring to is the close-quotation mark (“), followed by the period (.), or, alternatively, by a […]
When I introduce any Victorian literature to students, I initially ask them to brainstorm words they associate with Victorian, and I write their responses on the blackboard. Overwhelmingly, they see the period and its figures as resoundingly restrained. Though many American college students define the Victorians by their apparently repressed sexuality, troubling gender relations, and […]
Teaching Writing to Students with Learning Disabilities What is a Learning Disability? A learning disability is when a person has extreme difficulty learning in a typical manner. This can be caused by one factor, or many. People who are learning disabled are clinically diagnosed by a professional, be it a pediatrician or a psychologist, and […]
I’ve taught several classes on WWI literature and culture, and one challenge has often arisen. Most of the literature we now study that takes up the war, whether it be canonical (Wilfred Owen, Ernest Hemingway) or not (Helen Zenna Smith) was written or published in the decades after the war ended. How can students get […]
By Dan Irving Much has been made of recent efforts to shift STEM to STEAM, or the inclusion of the arts in an effort to integrate “wonder, critique, inquiry, and innovation” into the typical STEM curriculum. Steven Pearlstein’s article on “the parents who won’t let their children study literature,” published in the Washington Post last […]