A quick note on the neuroscience of reading

I’m sure it has been noted before, but Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (2007) makes a persuasive defense of literary instruction. The goal, she writes, is to transform fluent readers into expert readers:
If a common letter pattern or a word like “bear” appears to an expert reader, it will trigger its own network, rather [...]

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The summertime canon

Yesterday I finished TAing a seven-week interdisciplinary course for incoming first-year students. There is no greater academic high than the experience of 18 students focused almost exclusively on your course for 10 hours a week, but the pressure of that concentrated attention threatens to explode through cracks in the syllabus.
The pressures on these students are [...]

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Can we make education more like a video game?

In the ’90s I spent more hours than I care to count playing Sonic the Hedgehog, collecting as many rings as it was in my power to collect. By what industrial practice Dr. Robotnik’s machinations produced floating jewelry as a byproduct remains unclear, and even less clear was what Sonic did with all those rings: [...]

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What do you want to learn today?

One legacy of No Child Left Behind is that instructors everywhere shudder collectively, like a species suddenly aware of the fragility of its ecosystem, whenever someone starts talking about accountability.
I wonder, though, what would happen if we were to drop the first syllable of the word and focus instead on countability. If you’re a blogger, [...]

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The Amazonification of higher ed

Stephanie Rosenbloom’s “The Professor as Open Book” (NYT 3/20) quotes professors’ responses the complaints leveled against them on RateMyProfessor.com, but, perhaps surprisingly, doesn’t critique RMP as a system.
When I was an undergraduate in the ’90s, my college squelched a local effort to compile a database of students’ responses to their professors, arguing that students ought [...]

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The “Why Teach Literature” question

My post yesterday pointed to already-well-circulated critiques of the way we teach literature in American universities. I failed to mention a discussion among academic bloggers who spent much of January answering the question asked by a well-attended panel at MLA ‘07: “Why Teach Literature Anyway?“
These bloggers suggest that literature offers students tools for social, psychological, [...]

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Are the humanities “overly focused on critique”?

When I teach lit, I begin the semester by asking students why the University of Wisconsin pays tens of millions of dollars requiring every student to pass a class in English literature. Over the years my students have offered career-affirming answers:

literature teaches us how to understand what happens in someone else’s mind
literature gives us a [...]

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