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Does the ‘library of the future’ need books?
The University of Chicago's Mansueto Library Every day I cross Ellis Avenue to avoid the construction zone of the University of Chicago’s emerging Mansueto Library, whose elliptical crystal dome caps...
View ArticleIf kids aren’t ready for college, what hope for humanities?
The future of education just got a little bleaker: New York State officials released data this week indicating that more than half of all the high school students in the state are not ready for college...
View ArticleThe Joy-Less Club
Florida’s recently (and narrowly) elected Governor Rick Scott has just unveiled his proposed state budget, which includes more than $3.3 billion in cuts to K-12 education. In addition to a $700...
View ArticleWhat good is studying the humanities?
My first post for this blog was inspired by New York State officials reporting that less than half of the state’s high school students are graduating prepared for success in college or well-paid...
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A misplaced medias
While attending the Association of Writers and Writing Programs 2011 conference in Washington, DC, I grew angry at the commercialization of—like everything else—literature, the fetishization of...
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Can you teach thoughtful writing?
I’ve been teaching writing for about eight years now. I’ve taught rhetoric, freshman composition, magazine writing, newspaper reporting, and cultural criticism. Here’s the thing: I’ve never taken a...
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Piko in Paje – ancient Swahili lady lessons on pleasure and pain
“Siri ya mtungi aijuae kata.” The secret of the water pitcher is only known by its ladle. — Swahili proverb Where did you learn about sex ? I mean, not just about sex, but about pleasure? My sex...
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Let’s talk about Shop Class
Last fall I finally got around to reading Matthew Crawford’s 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft: an Inquiry Into the Value of Work, a rich and compelling meditation on American education, “knowledge”...
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Alphabet power and orthographic ghosts: The short story of Swahili script
In Swahili, uhai means “life.” In Hebrew, it’s chai. In Arabic, it’s haiya. So there it is, life itself braided into three languages entangled with my own history as an American Jew strangely drawn to...
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Madison in photos, a look at the pro-union rallies
On Wednesday night, Republicans in the Wisconsin State Senate and Governor Scott Walker pushed through a portion of the Budget Repair Bill (perhaps illegally), effectively gutting the union rights of...
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Let kids rule the school, indeed
A classmate and professor of mine, in 1996, studying Boreal Ecology in Canada. As Mark Twain famously said: "All you need for learning to take place is a teacher, a student, and a log to s it on."...
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Examining the exam: Form IV failure or fraud?
Is there really beauty in failure? We sometimes romanticize failure as a kind of revelation. Honey in the garbage heap, lesson in the crease. But lately I’ve been thinking about schooling. We advocate...
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The digital quadrangle
From the New York Times I recently designed a syllabus for a course at NYU on writing for digital media. Unlike most of my writing courses, which focus on journalism, this was meant to have broader...
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Toni Morrison’s $30,000 payday
By now you’ve probably heard about Toni Morrison’s next big speaking engagement: the commencement address at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The Nobel Laureate will receive $30,000 and an honorary...
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Who should run our schools?
In New York City, where I live, the public school system has long been a logistical quagmire. It’s the largest in the country, attempting to educate 1.1 million kids at 1,700 different schools with an...
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Langston Hughes in Paradise
In the later part of his life, the poet Langston Hughes made several trips to Africa, presenting and leading writing workshops all the way from Nigeria to Uganda. Some say he emerged as an official...
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“Feeling postcolonial?”
That’s how my professor of Postcolonial Studies began each class last fall. I’m not especially sure how we would feel postcolonial—in fact, a lot of people would say that a group of graduate students...
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Evaluation fixation
In his critique of higher education — how it began in this country versus what it’s become — for last week’s New Yorker, Louis Menand makes clear a few unfortunate facts of college today. Namely, that...
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OMG, Illinois legislates illiteracy
Illinois has dropped writing skills from its standardized testing for high school juniors and will focus only on reading and arithmetic. Officials claim that this will save the state $2.4 million....
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Screw your spirit of inquiry, make us lots of money.
A still from the 2003 Canadian documentary, "The Corporation" Executives at Deutsche Bank in Germany thought they had a brilliant idea: give two German universities about $17 million over four years,...
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An education, not a credential
Imagine taking a class on n on-Euclidian geometry. Now imagine that your professor doesn’t know anything about geometry at all, let alone an obscure, archaic branch of it. Inste ad, she h as a PhD in...
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To wire or not to wire
Last week the New York Times ran an article about an Indiana school district that has dispensed with textbooks, pencils, and the o ther antiquated tools of primary education. Instead, each desk...
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Follow my lessons, not my footsteps
Last week I received an email from a former student asking for a letter of recommendation for graduate school, and I had no problem saying yes. He had taken three courses with me in three years, and...
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A student’s death, mediated
On Friday, I woke up early, around 5:15 a.m. and checked my email. There, amid the junk mail, was a subject line that left me stunned. It informed me that a student I’d had for two courses at Hunter...
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What to do about student loan debt?
In a recent series of opinion articles on The New York Times website, various thinkers ponder the wisdom and efficacy of the changes to student loan debt repayment proposed by Obama: that borrowers be...
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Safety and Zen in New York City
The Metropolitan Transit Authority, or MTA, in New York is not known for a lot of things: reliability, friendly service, cleanliness, reasonable pricing… It’s a sprawling, filthy system that’s made...
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When academia becomes a novelty act
This news is sort of last-week, but it’s been on my mind. Charlie Trotter, the famed Chicago restaurateur who helped ween that city off its diet of hot dogs and milkshakes, introducing farm-fresh...
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The audacity of Udacity
Much of education is aesthetic: The architecture, the “look” of the student body, the general vibe of a university. Such considerations may be superficial, but they aren’t trite. The feel of a school...
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What does a writing teacher look like?
Charlie Newton and Jonathan Eig conducting one of their writing workshops for the Chicago Police Department. Photo: Peter Hoffman for the New York Times When I was in high school, the only two writing...
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The urge to write meets the blue day
“The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life. It is a habit of antiphony: of call and response.”...
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Your thoughts on Adrienne Rich, please
I first learned about Adrienne Rich, who died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, CA, at the age of 82, in college almost 20 years ago. I was 18, and many of my professors adored Rich. They taught...
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Romney’s education plan ain’t liberal
Mitt Romney has declared one of his first promises as a would-be president, to provide children the opportunity to attend any public school in the state in which they live without additional cost. This...
View ArticleRomney, from a teacher’s perspective
Here is an example of something I do in my classroom, room 209, when conflict arises, which it inevitably does when almost thirty teenagers remain in a room with four walls, one of which is less than...
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Exit seminars, enter Prada
While many universities are beefing up their online course offerings, those of us who had memorable college experiences may console ourselves with one thought: the college will still be there, for...
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The endless, perplexing, and ultimately essential question of whether writing...
In this month’s Atlantic, Peg Tyre writes about a school on Staten Island that has “revolutionized” writing pedagogy: by going back to basics. Judith Hochman, who originally developed the very...
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The ironic death of postmodernism
I am currently teaching a class at Hunter College titled Journalism & Society, which analyzes the impact of journalism on culture and vice versa. We discuss corporate consolidation, the so-called...
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Philip Roth retires from fiction
Last year, Philip Roth said he was done reading fiction. Now he says he’s done writing it, too. Roth’s literary output could be compared to Woody Allen’s with film. Since he published his first...
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Learning to love non-fiction
Last week, the New York Times published a piece on its website about the seemingly insurmountable challenge of teaching students how to write. The author, an English teacher, concludes not that...
View ArticleBill Gates on the higher-education crisis
While state funding for higher education plummets, tuition soars to make up the difference. As a result, young people are often being saddled with insurmountable debt, all in the name of getting that...
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Can we love fiction once we’re no longer seeking answers?
I once asked my father, who had majored in English, gotten his master’s degree in English, and for years had dreams of being a full professor of English before he decided (wisely) to pursue a more...
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The fallacy of the 10K B.A.
In an Op/Ed for today’s New York Times, Arthur Brooks offers himself as evidence that cheap, zero-residence higher education not only works, but is a moral imperative. The moral imperative has less to...
View ArticleWhat Is a Thesis? (a.k.a. La Thèse)
Credit for this video goes to Brandon Hopkins, who teaches English at Frederick Community College in Frederick, MD. Hopkins, who conceived, wrote, and stars in this gem, graduated from the University...
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The disillusioned and the lost, or, Frances Ha’s life lessons
Noah Baumbach’s latest film, Frances Ha, takes us into the world of a young woman a few years out of college. The effect is startlingly accurate, at times painful, and generally brilliant. The subject...
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You don’t need to study the arts. Or do you?
He was the last person you’d expect to say that people don’t need to study the humanities. He’s made an entire career out of them — as an educator, as an organizer of public programs, and as a widely...
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Writing your way into college
Bard College announced this week that it was introducing a new admissions option for prospective students, one devoid of GPAs, test scores, and other stone-cold metrics that, some say, do little to...
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How Gary Coleman taught me to read
There’s an episode in the final season of Diff’rent Strokes in which Arnold (Gary Coleman) acts up in class and is challenged by his teacher, played by Kareem Abdul Jabbar, to teach a lesson one day....
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Is the university over?
Minerva — hardly a word you’d associate with higher education. It sounds more like a brand-name medication designed to treat anxiety — Minimize your nerves with Minerva! Or maybe a South American root...
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How a new Autocorrect program could hijack your soul
Dennis Paoli, the coordinator of the Reading & Writing Center at Hunter College in New York City, has a short but very effective definition of writing: Writing is thinking and vice versa. In other...
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