Fiction Writer's Lexicon
A fiction writer's Lexicon by Kit Whitfield - A phrasebook of terms for issues that occur repeatedly in fiction.
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March 29, 2007
March 26, 2007
May '07 Levy Information
May '07 Levy Information The $9.1 million dollars from this May levy are needed to provide textbooks, buses, staffing, fuel and utilities while keeping schools safe and well maintained. Failure of this levy will lead to cuts before the next school year begins.
March 23, 2007
Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance
The poems of Langston Hughes, A Brief Guide to the Harlem Renaissance and A Guide to Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes at Voices and Visions
More poems by Hughes
Jitterrbug Days Harlem in the 1940's
By KEVIN BAKER
African American Odyssey: World War I and Postwar Society
Langston Hughes
On the Weary Blues
Timeline of the Harlem Renaissance
Langston Hughes and Richmond, Virginia
PBS Resources:
Drop Me Off in Harlem and Black Writers Tell It on the Mountain
March 22, 2007
Donald Murray 1924 – 2006
Meaning is not thought up and then written down. The act of writing is an act of thought. All writing is experimental in the beginning. It is an attempt to solve a problem, to find a meaning, to discover its own way towards a meaning.
- Donald Murray
What a Writing Life Has Given Me
By Donald Murray
Donald Murray Taught Writing By Writing
SeaCoastNH.com
March 21, 2007
Red Badge of Courage
The Red Badge begins with the Union Army encamped north of the Rappahannock river. To the south can be seen the "red eyelike gleam" of Confederate campfires. The army has been in camp for some time, as the soldiers have built semi-permanent structures in which to live: soon after the "youthful private," Henry Fleming, is introduced he retreats into a structure of "log walls" with a "folded tent" for a roof and a fireplace with a clay chimney.
Newsmap 3-21-07
March 19, 2007
Free Speech in School
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments today in its first student expression case in nearly 20 years, a case involving a high school student who was suspended for displaying a banner that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" across the street from his high school.
Supreme Court hears oral arguments in 'Bong Hits 4 Jesus' case
Student Press Law Center
March 19, 2007
Court Probes Limits on Student Speech
NYTimes
March 19, 2007
Right of students to free speech put to Supreme Court
The Boston Globe
By Mark Sherman, March 18, 2007
Court upholds student speech rights
Ruling favors teen suspended for sign: 'Bong Hits 4 Jesus'
San Francisco Chronicle March 13, 2006
The court should use this case to reaffirm Tinker’s famous pronouncement that students do not shed their right to free speech “at the schoolhouse gate.”
Students’ Right to Free Speech
NYTimes Editorial
March 20, 2007
Open Source Town Hall? Newspapers?
Is Wikipedia the New Town Hall? from In These Times
Assignment Zero, a collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental journalism site established by Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, intends to use not only the wisdom of the crowd, but their combined reporting efforts — an approach that has come to be called “crowdsourcing.”
“Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?” NYU Professor Rosen asked last week on Wired.com.
All the World’s a Story
David Carr NYTimes March 19, 2007
Pro-Am Journalism Opens on the Web featuring NewAssignment.Net - an experiment in open-source reporting.
Read about The Pro-Am Revolution and Howard Rheingold who coined the term “the virtual community.”
More on Wikipedia
Krapp's Last Tape
Krapp's Last Tape on YouTube
Harold Pinter's Last Stand from NYTimes
March 18, 2007
Digital Self-Portraits
All About Me - ahree lee and Living My Life Faster - A Daily Photo Project
Digital Self-Portraits
NYTimes Sunday, March 18, 2007
March 17, 2007
The Pogues
A Ramble Through the Mind of the Pogues’ Poet (PDF)
By ANDY WEBSTER
NYTimes March 13, 2007
How Close Is Too Close to Shane MacGowan and the Pogues?
By NICHOLAS KULISH
NYTimes March 17, 2007
The Pogues: If I Should Fall From Grace With God
Rolling Stone Music Review
Bob Geldof on The Pogues from The Pogues website
March 15, 2007
Alice's Restaurant
Alice's Restaurant video and lyrics.
Arlo's dad, Woody Guthrie
This Land is Your Land
Flogging Molly
March 14, 2007
Kosinski - Marshall McLuhan
Was Kosinski drawing a metaphor for the impacts of electronic media on perception and thinking, and the emergence of the post-literate man? Marshal McLuhan wrote about three stages in the development of mankind - preliterate, literate and post literate. Preliterate society existed until the development of an alphabetic phonetic language. Literate society's development was accelerated by the invention of the moveable type printing press. Post literate society began developing with the invention of the telegraph and was accelerated by the development of TV and computers. Most of what we know is based on literate perceptions and means of communication. Chance the Gardner is Kosinski's conception of what someone would be like if they skipped the literate age entirely. Chance's learning is preliterate and post literate. He learned from nature and TV.
- Paul Schumann
Wired 1.01: Scream of Consciousness
Intrigued by Paglia's intellectual resemblance to Marshall McLuhan - patron saint of Wired magazine - Stewart Brand, the author of the Media Lab, caught up with Paglia in the court of a San Francisco hotel.
Wired News: Honoring Wired's Patron Saint
Wired 1.05: Repurposing the Material Girl By Nicholas Negroponte
Marshall McLuhan, the Man and his Message
Canadian Broadcast Corp Archives and The Connection.org : Revisiting Marshall McLuhan NPR
Also by Paul Schumann - The Wave of the Future: From Four Causes to Four Laws
March 13, 2007
Manzanar
March 12, 2007
Very Short Stories
Very Short Stories: 33 writers. 5 designers. 6-word science fiction.
The Echo Maker
The Echo Maker - By Richard Powers
NYTimes Books Review
In the Heart of the Heartland
Review by Margaret Atwood, The New York Review of Books
The Believer Interview with Richard Powers
The Last Generalist An Interview with Richard Powers
Richard Powers wrote The Echo Maker using voice recognition software on a tablet PC. Read about his process in "How to Speak a Book" (PDF) - NYTimes January 7, 2007
March 07, 2007
Bloody Sunday - March 7, 1965
The Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights ended three weeks that represented the political and emotional peak of the modern civil rights movement. On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas and drove them back into Selma.
We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement
The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in 1971 as a small civil rights law firm. Today, the Center is internationally known for its tolerance education programs, its legal victories against white supremacists and its tracking of hate groups. Located in Montgomery, Alabama – the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement – the Center was founded by Morris Dees and Joe Levin, two local lawyers who shared a commitment to racial equality.
On the publication of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
According to The Writer's Almanac, On this day in 1923, Robert Frost's (books by this author) poem ""Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" was published in The New Republic magazine. It was Frost's favorite of his own poems. Though it's a poem about winter, Frost wrote the first draft on a warm morning in the middle of June. The night before he had stayed up working at his kitchen table on a long, difficult poem called "New Hampshire" (1923). He wrote "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" in just a few minutes, almost without lifting his pen off the page. He said, "It was as if I'd had a hallucination."
Of poetry Frost wrote that,
"It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life--not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion."
Dark Darker Darkest(PDF)
The New Republic Review of The Notebooks of Robert Frost
By Christopher Benfey 01.16.07
March 06, 2007
Larkin Gifford's Harmonica
Check out Larkin Gifford's Harmonica by Phillip Bimstein at CD Baby.
March 02, 2007
Undestanding What You Read
Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge—of Words and the World
By E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
Most vocabulary growth results incidentally, from massive immersion in the world of language and knowledge.
1. Fluency allows the mind to concentrate on comprehension;
2. Breadth of vocabulary increases comprehension and facilitates further learning; and
3. Domain knowledge, the most recently understood principle, increases fluency, broadens vocabulary, and enables deeper comprehension.
Also by Hirsch - Many Americans can read but can't comprehend
Reading Comprehension Instruction: What Makes Sense and
International Reading Association: Focus on Reading Comprehension
Don’t Talk to a Friend While Reading This
Multitasking hinders learning
New brain research suggests that distractions that divide students' attention--such as surfing the web or sending instant messages--can affect the way they learn, making the knowledge they gain harder to use later on. The study could have important implications for today's students, many of whom are accustomed to multitasking while completing homework or listening in class.
Bad Report Card
New scores, based on tests given in 2005, show that only about 35 percent of 12th graders are proficient in reading.
NYTimes Editorial February 27, 2007
The news from American high schools is not good. The most recent test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the national report card, finds that American 12th graders are actually performing worse in reading than 12th graders did in 1992, when a comparable exam was given. In addition, 12th-grade performance in reading has been distressingly flat since 2002, even though the states were supposed to be improving the quality of teaching to comply with the No Child Left Behind education act.
NAEP 2005 Assessment Results Press Release (PDF)
The new scores, based on tests given in 2005, show that only about 35 percent of 12th graders are proficient in reading. Simply put, this means that a majority of the country’s 12th graders have trouble understanding what they read fully enough to make inferences, draw conclusions and see connections between what they read and their own experiences. The math scores were even worse, with only 23 percent of 12th graders performing at or above the proficient level.
Marginal literacy and minimal math skills might have been adequate for the industrial age. But these scores mean that many of today’s high school seniors will be locked out of the information economy, where a college degree is the basic price of admission and the ability to read, write and reason is essential for success.
Congress, which is preparing to reauthorize both the No Child Left Behind Act and the Higher Education Act, needs to take a hard look at these scores and move forcefully to demand far-reaching structural changes.
It should start by getting the board that oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress testing to create rigorous national standards for crucial subjects. It should also require the states to raise the bar for teacher qualifications and end the odious practice of supplying the neediest students with the least qualified teachers. This process would also include requiring teachers’ colleges, which get federal aid, to turn out higher-quality graduates and to supply many more teachers in vital areas like math and science. If there’s any doubt about why these reforms are needed, all Congress has to do is read the latest national report card.
March 01, 2007
Name that accent
Browse the Speech Accent Archive - Everyone who speaks a language, speaks it with an accent. A particular accent essentially reflects a person's linguistic background. When people listen to someone speak with a different accent from their own, they notice the difference, and they may even make certain biased social judgments about the speaker.