FSRC: annual report
The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its fifth year.
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“By the Book” for the rest of us, now with more books.
Digital vs. analog Nancy
In today’s Nancy, children debate the advantages of reading in pixels and print. Highly inventive stuff from Olivia Jaimes.
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“By the Book” for the rest of us, now with more childhood reading.
Recently updated
“By the Book” for the rest of us, now with more books.
Recently updated
“By the Book,” now with a link to questions and answers from another blogger.
“By the Book” for the rest of us
What books are on your nightstand?
Phonics again
Everything old is new again.
George Steiner (1929–2020)
“I’d love to be remembered as a good teacher of reading.”
“Just words”
An excerpt from A Warning, by Anonymous.
Reading in the news
“The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe.”
“Though” and “the other thing”
The talking heads on cable news are quoting “I would like you to do us a favor,” which looks bad enough as is. But we would do well not to overlook the word that follows: “though.” You need money for military equipment. But Trump needs something too. And — if we read carefully — it becomes clear that the favor has several parts: a search for a mythical server, receptiveness to overtures from Barr and Giuliani, and an investigation (with Barr) into the Bidens. The words “the other thing” tie the parts together and point back to “I would like you to do us a favor though.”
College these days
You can find nuance in this piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education if you like, but here’s the bottom line: a professor invited his students to read a book — a “physical book” — for extra credit.
Randing the ramparts
“Our army [manned?] the [?], it rand the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do.”
FSRC: annual report
The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its fourth year.
Reading or not
Behind the Chronicle of Higher Education paywall, Steven Johnson’s report on “The Fall, and Rise, of Reading” in college courses. Here, a few takeaways.
More reading
On one page of The Chronicle of Higher Education, an argument for less reading and more “writing.” But on another page: an account of a community-college’s effort to make use of Columbia University’s core curriculum.
Less reading, more “writing”
To my mind, reading and writing are just things one does in a college class. As students’ language skills decline, assigning less reading and more “writing” solves nothing.
Reading, really fast
I learned yesterday that for some English majors, it’s now a point of pride to go really fast when reading aloud, with little or no regard for phrasing or intonation. Why is going fast a point of pride? Because so many students cannot read aloud with much fluency.
Learning to read
Emily Hanford, education correspondent for American Public Media, asks why we are still teaching reading the wrong way: “To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction.”
A home entertainment system
Ammon Shea: “The fact that my shelves are filled with things I haven’t yet read and want to, and things that I’ve read before and want to revisit, means I will never be at a loss for entertainment at home.”
“Slow Reading”
Richard Lanham: “Every course in composition ought to be a course in Slow Reading.”
A meeting of the minds
Another step toward what I call the reality-TV-ification of everything : today’s Donald Trump–Kanye West meeting. How glorious to have two proud non-readers of books in the Oval Office at the same time.
Balzac: books and flowers
As necessary as bread.
Close-reading Brett Kavanaugh
If Kavanaugh wants to claim (in a way that defies all plausibility) that the acts of which he’s accused were without sexual intent, the denial “I’ve never sexually assaulted anyone” becomes a crafty way to dodge the question of whether he did what he’s accused of doing.
Book clubs and the Internets
The Economist reports on book clubs and the Internets.
“Thanks to my evening reading”
Reading to stay sane. From W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo.
Sunday in The Trivium
“‘When’ is position in relation to the course of extrinsic events which measure the duration of a substance, for example, Sunday afternoon.”
FSRC: annual report
The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its third year.
“Thin it out”
Everything that needs to be conveyed to the President must be boiled down, the former staffer said, to “two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of ‘See Jane run.’”