January 2011
12 posts
“Do not overwrite. Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome,...”
– EB White
One out of two ain't bad.
They say that you can tell a lot about a person from the way things are arranged in his or her room. (“They,” in this case, includes Sam Gosling, author of Snoop.)
Because “things in a room” yields a near unmanageable amount of information, I sometimes like to think about this in terms of the proportion of space occupied by each type of thing. By arranging activities and...
The year is still young!
It’s about time to take stock of progress on my resolutions.
The daily ones are going quite well and promise to continue. I’ve mindfully consumed water, plants, and text every day.
My only monthly goal was to obtain fresh, local produce. In true procrastinator fashion, I signed up at Farm Fresh to You yesterday, just in time for my first CSA box to arrive at the end of the month....
The benefits of the implied or →
bobulate:
Steve Davis on the messiness of “and”:
“Education is not a “this OR that” concept; rather it is a “this AND that” concept. “Or” is clean. “And” is messy. “Or” is obvious “And” is nuance. “Or” is destructive. “And” is human. Do you interact with your students the same way you tweet? Do you eat mashed potatoes AND gravy? Which word describes your pedagogy in the classroom and tweets on...
GAH.
My apartment building makes available two outside parking spaces and a garage. Soon after I moved in, I swore off the garage because I hit both a dumpster and a pole in its cramped space. I fought other cars for the outside spaces, often waiting to swoop in after their owners left for work. Sometimes, though, I had to park on the street. Sometimes I got lucky and avoided a ticket; sometimes I was...
Resolutions ferrealz
I know I acted like I was too cool for resolutions, but I do want to make some.
Daily:
I will eat plants every day.
I will drink water every day.
I will read at least a few pages without interruption every day.
Monthly:
I will either go to the farmer’s market or have a CSA box delivered every month.
For the year:
I will write a children’s book (co-written and illustrated by...
The Elements of Clunk
Ben Yagoda on student writing.
This makes sense. People expect Millennials to be overly informal in academic writing, but their deficiency is not in distinguishing an e-mail from a paper:
Are you surprised by the absence of smiley faces, LOL-type abbreviations, and slang terms like “diss” or “phat”? A reading of the typical lament about student writing would lead you to...
An assortment of resolutions
Over the past couple of weeks, quite a few potential resolutions have popped into my head. I haven’t really taken the time to figure out which of these I’ll actually be able to commit to, but here they are before I forget them entirely:
Teach an AWESOME class this summer. (Step 1: figure out what I mean by “AWESOME.”)
Write and share a children’s book (to be...
Innoventions →
bobulate:
David Rakoff takes on the Disney Innoventions Dream House:
[C]an we pause for a moment to talk about that term, Innovention? A neologism that, in an effort to turbo-charge meaning, takes two perfectly eloquent and unassailable words and by combining them renders both suspect. It is a word developed by a committee, one that can only be spoken unironically if one is being paid to do so,...
Weird thought
An odd thing just occurred to me while I was reading on BART: maybe I should consider revising my thesis (now that almost 2 years have passed).
…If only I could find the damn thing.