Rolling Henry Louis Gates Jr. Style.

Reposted from my Tumblr, because I went to the effort of typing this up and it keeps blowing my mind with how well-argued and everything it is.

Henry Louis Gates Jr: Hello?

The Enlightenment: Yes?

HLG Jr: Is that the Enlightenment?

TE: Yes, yes it is. What can I do for you?

Filed under: teaching

The faithfulness of his promises displayed.

• Prisoners of Hope: The Story of Our Captivity and Freedom in Afghanistan by Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer, with Stacy Mattingly
• Bruchko: The Astonishing True Story of a 19-Year-Old American, His Capture by the Motilone Indians and His Adventures in Christianizing the Stone Age Tribe by Bruce Olson
• Escape in Iraq: The Thomas Hamill Story by Thomas Hamill, Paul T Brown and Jay Langston
• American Hostage: A Memoir of a Journalist Kidnapped in Iraq and the Remarkable Battle to Win His Release by Micah Garen and Marie-Helene Carleton
• Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis – The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam by Mark Bowden
• Long March to Freedom: Tom Hargrove’s Own Story of his Kidnapping By Colombian Narco-Guerillas by Tom Hargrove
• Den of Lions: A Startling Memoir of Survival and Triumph by Terry Anderson
• 13 Days of Terror: Held Hostage by Al-Qaeda Linked Extremists — A True Story by Greg Williams

Filed under: teaching

What Is Literature?

Any other ideas?

Filed under: teaching

Colin Farrell vs Judy Kuhn

Filed under: teaching

Student Grammar Bad

I just finished marking 55 portfolios for the first-year undergrad. English Lit. class I taught this year.

That’s 55 x 3 essays. That’s 165 essays. In < a week.

Most of the portfolios were good, showing the students had understood the course and have done well for their first year. (There was a lot of repetition between portfolios, obviously, but there you go.) Some of them were rushed and poor quality. One portfolio was absolutely outstanding.

I plan to talk a bit more about my teaching experiences at some point, but for today, I’m just going to take the cheap route and post some of the most knuckle-biting prose I came across this week.

Filed under: teaching