"Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." — Stephen King
July 1, 2016
Recently, I visited Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house in Concord, MA, which has the chair that Emerson sat in while he wrote his famous essay “Nature.” As a fan of what Anne Fadiman calls “You-Are-There Reading” I had to reacquaint myself with this wonderful piece. When it was … Read More
June 27, 2016
Can small changes in strategy result in significant improvements? This new book for college instructors by James M. Lang argues convincingly that they can. While some of the techniques are not new – my mother asked her students to make predictions 40 years ago – all the … Read More
June 16, 2016
As unlikely as it sounds, this quote comes from a letter of recommendation for an associate dean of student affairs applicant, who also happens to be the former lover of the creative writing professor who sends all of the letters in this hilarious expostulatory novel. His comments … Read More
June 9, 2016
Purely by coincidence, I was reading Virginia Woolf”s A Room of One’s Own during the week that the first woman became the presumptive nominee for a major political party in the U.S. In 1928, when Woolf gave a series of lectures on “Women and Fiction,” she described … Read More
June 2, 2016
No contemporary writer is better at convincing the reader that a person with many faults can be a hero than Richard Russo. His mixture of empathy, honesty, warmth and wit made Sully a heroic figure in Nobody’s Fool and makes Doug Raymer the equally-unlikely hero in … Read More
May 26, 2016
Adrienne Rich was a revolutionary. As Margalit Fox wrote in the New York Times, Rich “accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that … Read More
May 19, 2016
Sociologist Jay Howard notes that in 1976 researchers Karp and Yoels distinguished between students who paid attention from students who created the appearance of paying attention, which they termed “civil attention.” If you ever had a hard time getting a discussion going in class, it may be … Read More
May 5, 2016
The “truth” looms large in Tobias Wolff’s memoir A Boy’s Life. He tells us, for example, how he hijacked the school application process by creating fake transcripts and letters of recommendations when he applied to schools out East. He describes two types of truth – things he … Read More
April 28, 2016
I’m coming to the realization that it’s not a lack of ability that holds most students back: their beliefs about their abilities hold them back. Carol Dweck calls their beliefs “mindsets.” She says that students have either a “fixed” mindset, which says they can’t get any better … Read More
April 21, 2016
More than an account of her journey from a sheep-farm in Australia to graduate school at Harvard, this memoir explores the reasons for her decisions with frankness, even-handedness, and intellectual rigor. Jill Ker Conway left her country “. . . because I didn’t fit in, never … Read More
April 14, 2016
To increase learning in the classroom, don’t focus on curriculum or using new “tips and tricks” for instruction. Instead, Ron Ritchhart, a researcher at Harvard’s graduate school of education, writes that we should change the “culture” of our classrooms by making “thinking valued, visible, and actively … Read More
April 7, 2016
Many textbooks for first-year college students take a “here’s how” approach to writing outlines, developing thesis statements, and citing sources. The authors of Habits of the Creative Mind begin with a much different premise. They believe that the focus should be on “nurturing curiosity, creativity, and the … Read More
March 31, 2016
Can you love a poem that you don’t understand? I think this question divides the poetry-reading public into two camps: those who prefer Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, and Ted Kooser on the one side, and those who prefer poets such as Mark Strand on the other. In … Read More
