Some Notes on the ‘Love’ in The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

The University of Texas Arlington First Year Reading Experience Program, known as the OneBook Program, has selected The History of Love by Nicole Krauss as the book for 2008-2009. As faculty co-chair of OneBook I’ve had a lot of fun assisting in the development of study guides and such materials to help students as they [...]

Thank you Inside Higher Ed

I’m grateful to Inside Higher Ed for publishing my latest essay, on academic avatars. It’s nice to write something relatively quickly and have it read quickly and responded to so quickly. It’s not like writing articles for peer reviewed journals, which sometimes languish for years before seeing print, or even worse, trying to publish a [...]

Adventures in Paperless Grading

At the end of last semester I was faced with a decision. Either I printed out over 500 pages of student papers and take home exams or I graded them paperless, in microsoft word. The thought of slaughtering my printer or my departmental printer was too terrible, so I plunged in and tried to use [...]

“Only Connect…”: Top 10 Reasons College Professors Should Blog*

For two years, I’ve used course blogs in eight university courses, two of which were graduate seminars. At this point, I can’t teach without the freedom and opportunities afforded by blogs. Below are my top 10 reasons for professors to use blogs in their classes. At the end of this post I’ve included a slide [...]

Sample Slideshare Slideshow

Making it Real: The Poetry Chapbook and the College Classroom

Making it Real: The Poetry Chapbook and the College Classroom

Gracias a la Vida que me ha dado tanto
me ha dado el sonido y el abedecedario
con él las palabras que pienso y declaro
madre amigo hermano y luz alumbrando,
la ruta del alma del que estoy amando.
“Gracias a la Vida”, Violeta Parra

Last fall, I experimented with a different [...]

University Professors and Academics Criticize “Apocalypto”; reflections on a recent listserve thread

A week or two ago, I posted an “early” review of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto on this blog. I’m no expert on the Maya or the Aztecs, and found the film’s historicity disconcerting. It seemed to conflate the Maya and the Aztec and, in a first draft of my review, I referred to Jaguar Paw’s pursuers [...]