Poetry Contest

I entered the National Writers Union (Chapter 7) poetry competition this year, judged by Adrienne Rich. Got the announcement of the winners the other day. I didn’t win, but I didn’t expect to. Though I have won competitions over the years, whenever I enter a competition I take the attitude that it’s mostly a crapshoot. [...]

Waiting it Out

Dear diary: It started snowing yesterday afternoon & has kept snowing steadily for the last twenty-four hours. About a foot so far. Most of the snow we’d had in February had melted last week, just leaving some crusts in shadows & hollows, but we are definitely back to winter conditions. In the north country March [...]

Spring Break?

I don’t have classes to meet on Fridays, so in some sense today is the beginning of my Spring Break, but I can’t let myself think of it that way. I have about sixty student essays to grade & I need to make substantial progress on getting my Vietnam course fully on-line for its summer [...]

And Candy Makes Four

Dogs that is. (Boy am I going to get splogged on that post title!) Anyway, here is a picture of the newest Jack Russell, who joins two other JRTs & a chocolate lab in our household. We got her from the shelter yesterday after our friend Amy spotted here there. Amazing how quickly she settled [...]

Drip Drip Drip

What’s the old adage? It’s not the crime but the coverup? See Mark Kleiman’s blog for more links. And Josh Marshall has been all over this. Perhaps there are limits to the corruption Americans will accept in their elected & appointed officials. Perhaps.

Bird Notes

Throughout the winter, I saw both hairy woodpeckers & downeys at the feeders. They like suet. They were always solitary, though there may have been more than one individual. Now, I’ve seen pairs of both species. I haven’t had a chance to look closely enough to see whether these are pairs of competing males staking [...]

Code: Society for Literature, Science & the Arts

Looks like I’ll be going to this very cool conference next November. I’ve submitted a paper on teaching literature as the teaching of codes (as part of a panel using the novelist Richard Powers as a strange attractor) & the paper has been accepted — we’re just waiting for confirmation from the conference chair that [...]

Bonsai Notes

Warm enough today to take the pine & the juniper off the front porch & put them outside. It will be great if we get the rain that’s predicted. Bonsai love rainwater. This is the time of the year when we humans have to slosh through rain sitting on top of snow; the hardy bonsai [...]

Refworks Workshop

What’s wrong with this scenario? Instructions: Create a Refworks account. Open Refworks. Open a second (IE) window. Open Jstor. Use the export link after the citation to export it to Refworks. Question: Can I do this in Firefox using two tabs instead of two IE windows? Answer: I don’t know. Statement: The link in Jstor [...]

Learning to Read

Does anyone think that children learn to read exclusively phonetically or exclusively by whole word recognition? Well, yes, I suppose some poeple do, mostly people who have a financial interest in selling reading curricula to schools. And apparently the Bush administration believes in phonics. Believes in it enough to create a rigid ideology of reading [...]

« go back — keep looking »