Thursday, January 28, 2010

J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010

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J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye and a main character in the novel Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella, has died at the age of 91 ...
Sunday, January 24, 2010

Jay - Ee - Tee - Ess ...

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No, I'm not going to pontificate here about if/how/why my perennially heartbreaking, soul-crushing New York Jets are going to beat the m...
Sunday, January 3, 2010

The Gathering Storm

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One more week and it will be over. As my last Christmas/holiday break comes to an end, and I prepare to go into my final week of teaching, I...
1 comment:
Monday, December 21, 2009

A Paragraph About Nothing

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I feel compelled today to cross-post this exercise from my website. The purpose of the exercise is to read the paragraph, a Discussion parag...

Deep, Abiding Frustration

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I'm almost through grading the third of five classes' worth of "critical lens" essays that the students wrote last week af...
2 comments:
Thursday, December 17, 2009

Single Digits

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I have nine teaching days left. At some point I'm going to take the essays on this blog and attempt to compile them into a book, which I...
Tuesday, December 1, 2009

It's gold, Jerry. Gold.

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Today in class we were discussing the passage in Shoeless Joe when Ray Kinsella and J.D. Salinger arrive at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Coo...
Thursday, November 19, 2009

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

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I am always amused by students who actually still believe that they are somehow hurting me by refusing to do their work. Some of them are si...
1 comment:
Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Revealing

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It amazes me sometimes how much some of these children reveal about themselves without intending or realizing it. Here is last night's h...
Sunday, November 1, 2009

Reflections on My Last Open School

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Open School evening and afternoon passed without any over-the-top melodrama and no unreasonable complaints. Other than a few encores from pa...
Friday, October 23, 2009

Silly Season

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Once again, for emphasis, from Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary: en·abler ( i-'nA-b(&-)l&r) noun : one who enables ...
Saturday, October 17, 2009

Stupid Is as Stupid Does, Part II

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Well, here's a new one. Thursday I gave my first final-essay exam of the semester. Naturally, a lot of students did not show up to take ...
Friday, October 16, 2009

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

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I had an interesting conversation with a parent this morning. He dropped by to ask about his daughter's progress and the topic of homewo...
Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Homework, Re-revisited

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From Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary: en·abler ( i-'nA-b(&-)l&r) noun : one who enables another to persist in self...
4 comments:
Friday, September 18, 2009

Homework, Revisited

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I am assigning homework this year for the first time since at least 2004. The reasons why I have not given homework, I discussed earlier th...
Tuesday, August 18, 2009

A-B-C, Easy as...

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After suffering through 10 weeks of studying for, and then taking, the New York and New Jersey Bar exams, I spent the last two weeks of the ...
1 comment:
Friday, June 19, 2009

Feigned Helplessness

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One thing I cannot and will not ever accept is when a student responds to a quotation or a reading by saying, "I don't understand t...
Wednesday, May 20, 2009

15 Minutes of What?

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To follow up on "The Spanish Inquisition," it seems the Grand High Inquisitor after he left my classroom last week declared to my ...
1 comment:
Friday, May 15, 2009

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition.

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Well, the Quality Review has come and gone. And the result, like the Monty Python sketch from which I draw the title of this post, is absolu...
1 comment:
Thursday, May 7, 2009

Five Years Gone, Never Forgotten

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Five years ago tonight, 17-year-old Craig Grumet of Roslyn Heights died in a car accident on Wheatley Road. I had known Craig since he was 1...
1 comment: