- I would read a book about pencils.

For some reason, Grace, Jimmy, and I were talking about single-noun-subject books. What concrete thing interests you enough that you would read or write an entire book about it? Salt, for example.
Grace raised potatoes as a possibility.
“Pencils,” I said. “I love pencils. I would read an entire book about pencils.”
Yesterday, my library helpers found and [...]

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- Go far in friendship.

If you want to go far in friendship, you shouldn’t laugh at someone when they fall.

–said by Grace Guterman, age 9

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- Feedback season

When it’s midterms for students, it’s midterms for teachers. (There’s something rather binge-and-purge about school, isn’t there?) In the past two weeks, since Columbus Day, I’ve been reading, commenting on, and grading the drafts of technical reports and scientific analysis papers, about 35 altogether. They’re long (average: 20 pages), but after the first few in [...]

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- Learning to write: a meme

Over at digital digs, Alex Reid (someone I don’t know but whose thoughts I enjoy reading), writes about how he learned to write. While his post raises illuminating questions about a well-accepted pedagogy — that teachers’ experiences of learning to write and developing a writing practice are central to their teaching of first year composition [...]

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- The anonymous they

Today I heard students discussing feedback that their team had received from a few instructors on a presentation. The students’ sentences uniformly began with the pronoun “they.”
They liked [such and such].
They said [so and so].
They didn’t like [such and such].
After several of those sentences, the “they” became a blur, and, even though I had a [...]

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- Ancestral division of labor

In doing some reading and note-taking on the history of agriculture for my blueberry project, I came across this.
The need to care for children helped create division of labor among hunters and gatherers. Men hunted, women gathered. Of the two pursuits, gathering was clearly more important. While the capture of a single large animal might [...]

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- Store bought manure

In the first episode of season six of The Office (watch it here, on Hulu), Michael spread false rumors about several employees in order to cloak his having leaked the secret about Stanley’s affair. He figured if he spread a LOT of gossip, no one would know what was true and what was not. [...]

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- Reverse commuter

Do you know the work of the contemporary poet Deborah Garrison?
This one, in particular, is something I read out loud to myself every year, in the fall around this time.
I Saw You Walking
I saw you walking through Newark Penn Station
in your shoes of white ash. At the corner
of my nervous glance your dazed passage
first forced [...]

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- In the pines, in the pines

“What did you find out?” That was the question I was asked when Jimmy and I returned from our one-day field trip to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, to find Elizabeth White’s house, Suningive, and explore Historic Whitesbog Village, a state trust which preserves a turn-of-the-century company town built around cranberry and blueberry farming.
The [...]

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- If only we could go back, if only!

In a conversation about Ted Kennedy’s death and the Massachusetts response, James asked me about what he called my “JFK Jr. project,” a piece on the summer of 1999, when I became scarily obsessed — unusual for me — with the story of the crash of the plane piloted by John F. Kennedy, Jr. and [...]

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