Teach me to care and not to care.
“While teachers are apt to chide students about writing papers the night before, many teachers also procrastinate when it comes to grading and returning papers. Students who write their papers the night before rarely do great work, but teachers who attempt to grade forty essays in four hours are rarely doing great grading either.”
-From Grading Hacks for Humanities Teachers, my latest for CiRCE
I have never (ever) heard anything like this. Uncanny, unearthly, overwhelming.
Something new is almost always something old.
At the moment, I am going over the first draft of my next book, which has been copiously marked up with red pen by the editor. The following thought occurred to me (during my ninth hour of looking over the proposed edits):
Many teachers fill student papers with editorial marks and corrections, indicating that a certain word should be capitalized, or that a comma is needed, or that a certain sentence is awkward or needs to be rephrased.
However, there is no point in putting editorial marks on student work if the student is not asked to go back and fix them. If the teacher does not require corrections should be made and the work resubmitted, it is a waste of time to point out how things ought to be different.
“Modern beliefs about politics, church government, democracy, and so forth are all neatly and appropriately reflected in modern literature, modern music, and modern liturgies. We do not deserve a better culture than the one we have. Every culture is perfectly suited to the music it produces, the churches it builds, and the poems it writes. We cannot lament our inability to build a fitting sequel to St. Peter’s Basilica without simultaneously lamenting our complete lack of a theology that might compel us to do so.”
-from Love What Lasts, out later this year
A reader recently asked what books I would include in a “concise” library which could fit on a single shelf. When I began putting the list together, I had it in mind to distinguish between books I would choose simply because I enjoy teaching them and books I would choose for pleasure. The longer I considered the list, the less this seemed a genuine difference.
The Song of Roland
The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius
The Divine Comedy
Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke
Frankenstein, Shelley
Plato’s Republic
Jane Eyre, Bronte
Till We Have Faces, Lewis
The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro
Strangers on a Train, Highsmith
The Road, McCarthy
Stoner, Williams
The Little Prince, de Saint-Exupéry
Frog and Toad: The Complete Collection, Lobel
The Wind in the Willows, Grahame
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Bartlett
“At the moment, it appears movie theaters are on their way out. I think this a shame for the same reasons I think the casualization of church over the last fifty years is a shame.”
-from “If We Lose Movie Theaters,” my latest for CiRCE
Christians who are tempted to gaze longingly at the world and regard the world as a paragon of sophistication, all the while thinking Christians a lowly and embarrassing crowd of underfunded fundamentalists, really ought to spend five minutes scrolling through the “Origin of language” page on Wikipedia.
If you’re going to claim one corporate slogan is an informal fallacy, you might as well claim they’re all informal fallacies. For my money, though, no corporate slogan is an informal fallacy, but this is because informal logic have more to do with rhetoric than mathematics. Formal logic is the other way around.
I am teaching informal logic this year and I have collected a number of informal logic textbooks. Each author thinks he is quite clever for going to town on corporate slogans (“Just do it” is special pleading!), but they might as well be deconstructing poems.
“In the same way that very few people who have tattoos only have one, very few people trying to buy happiness are trying to buy it for the first time. You try to buy happiness—you buy something— but when it doesn’t make you happy, as opposed to concluding that happiness can’t be bought, you assume it was a swing and a miss and that you just need to keep trying.”
-from the latest episode of Proverbial, which is available now
Nothing is more permanent than ‘temporary’ arrangements, deficits, truces, and relationships; and nothing is more temporary than ‘permanent’ ones.
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.