krsj

New Facebook Group for Educators

2008-07-26T21:08:16Z

A group for educators who want to return to teaching students, kindergarten through graduate school, to think instead of just teaching facts, skills, concepts, and habits.

Students can't adapt what they learn because they are not taught to think. This prevents them from applying what they know in an unfamiliar context.

We need to teach students to think.

If you agree, why not join?

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=60092970334

Accents

2008-07-15T12:18:20Z

Many of you have seen this I'm sure, but some might find it useful.
I find it interesting. A site containing examples of many of the world's regional accents while speaking a phrase of English.

http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_atlas.php

Click on an area of the map, click on a flag, click on the play button.
Have fun!

krsj @ 2008-06-25T11:11:00

2008-06-25T15:14:23Z

I'm on Setanta Sports with Jose Mourinho.
If you follow English Premiere League soccer at all, you'll find this funny.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TOh3WlXJg0

You can see them all at:
http://www.setanta.com/IOSS/

If you don't watch EPL, they'll mean nothing, but I've been laughing so hard I've been crying.
I love these.
K

krsj @ 2008-06-15T20:11:00

2008-06-16T00:17:50Z

Okay, uncle, I'll participate... :-D

Meme

To participate, you grab the book closest to where you are seated now, go to page 123, find the fifth sentence, and blog it.

Book

Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. "At the same time, I envy you the free and undisguised converse with such a man."

Sorry it wasn't more interesting...

Tags

Anyone who wants to participate

krsj @ 2008-06-15T17:07:00

2008-06-15T21:17:38Z

So...
I've been shopping my new novel around for a new agent and with my nonfiction book, I've been shooting proposals directly to publishers that focus on education...

I've decided that I really like having an agent. My agent on the thriller novels was amazing. He taught me a lot and he's just a great guy. Supportive, patient, hardworking, straight-shooting.

I've gone onto projects now that he doesn't do much with, so I'm shopping for agents, but I've decided not to seek an agent just for the novel, but for the nonfiction as well. Actually, I mean to say that I'm seeking two agents at once. One for the novel and one for the philosophical nonfiction work.

Funny, since I first sold a book, things have CHANGED. In the old days, the best way to make an agent angry was to make initial contact by phone, but a close second was to email them. Now, so many of the agents I'm looking at want an email query. It's not only an option, it's a preference. I must say I prefer it too.

Although there's something fun about a big thick envelope with a 40-page book proposal on its way to someone, I really like the nearly instant feedback emails are providing, and when the proposals go out now it's at someone's request. Saves on postage at least!

Also, the first time I found an agent I used the Guide to Literary Agents, but now with Publisher's Marketplace website the search has gotten much more informed and interesting.

I have one more day of teaching. After that I will throw myself into writing and crits for the MFA program and for me.
I can't wait. Wish me luck!

K

krsj @ 2008-06-13T18:54:00

2008-06-13T23:14:14Z

Tim Russert is gone, and I'm sad about it.

I neither identify really as a Democrat nor as a Republican. I'm neither purely liberal nor conservative.

I believe that our country is not a Christian country, and that the best way to dishonor our founding fathers is to say that this country should have an official religion.  I believe that as soon as a man grows a uterus of his own, he can have a voice in the debate on a woman's right to an abortion. I believe in the right of marriage for everyone, and I believe that someone down on her or his luck deserves help.

At the same time, I hate the idea of the redistribution of wealth, I am sickened by the whining liberals who have no first hand knowledge of war but are self-appointed judges of its morality, and I have to sadly smile at those that believe that an SUV has more of an effect on climate change than does Earth's precession.

I am a realistic and compassionate objectivist.

Having said all this...I'm sad that Tim Russert is gone. He was not snide or cynical. He did not see a conspiracy around every corner. He was instead a grown-up in a world of intellectual and moral children. A world of those who see a conspiracy around every corner, those who see an evil ulterior motive behind every liberal or conservative act. They are the radicals. And worse are those radicals who whine about the evil and conspiracies they see, but do nothing constructive. They are nothing more than the political after-birth of those doing the heavy lifting.

But Tim Russert did the heavy lifting. He did the work. He stayed grounded and fair. He let people answer, was not paranoid, was articulate, and while not cynical he was skeptical. He did not think the world was an evil place, but instead a worthwhile place for the fight. His idea of research was not to believe every wacko lefty wingnut socialist website or every fascist right-wing self-righteous rag, but instead to read and to live in the mainstream, which is infinitely more difficult than to scream outrages from the rooftops of the fringe.

He was one of the good ones, and with his falling silent, I fear the nuts will be that much less drowned out.

K

krsj @ 2008-06-09T19:40:00

2008-06-09T23:45:10Z

Fun quote tonight on MSNBC...

One day you're the peacock, the next day you're the feather-duster...

So true.

Sent out some pieces of short fiction to Cimarron Review and Paris Review. Now it's more waiting.

Human Thinking

2008-06-01T15:21:55Z

I'm in the middle of reading student work about human thinking and how human thinking has changed. Throughout the semester students have been exposed to and considered topics in the social sciences and literature and then have worked on this single capstone paper on human thinking. They of course have written other papers concurrently, but this 8-10 page capstone document has been opened, added to, and/or revised almost 80 times over the past 18 weeks.

These 9th grade students have considered the Epic of Gilgamesh and Beowulf up through concepts from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Life of Pi, and Atlas Shrugged. They have thought and written about 5 major beliefs systems, namely Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They've worked with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Hobbes and Locke. The Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution. They have debated and written about the differences in the idea of justice from Hammurabi to today around the world. They've pondered the role of love, gender roles and power, from primitive humans until now. I've shown them how art has changed since cave paintings, teaching them perspective and requiring them to *gasp* draw in Humanities class. They looked at ancient Greece's and Rome's political, linguistic, and social contributions. They've drawn supply and demand models, considered climate change, and worked on bias detection in media. They've considered the root causes of revolution using the American, French, and Russian revolutions as case studies. They've read Shakespeare, Milton, Machiavelli, Voltaire, and Marx. They wrote first-person accounts of the flood their town experienced this spring, including photographs they took of a downtown under water. They read poetry from sources as diverse as Frost to Metallica, and wrote an English sonnet in the established meter and rhyme scheme.

They've taken all this exposure and written these capstone papers about how human thinking has changed (they also can argue that it hasn't) and to sum it all up, I'm proud of them. Some of them for the first time have done some real work beyond just producing what it is they think the teacher wants. They haven't just regurgitated information I gave them, they have synthesized new stuff.

I'm proud of both semesters of kids for exceeding what many people think students this young can do. For producing quality material without being overly supported. For taking intellectual risks and for actually thinking, many for the first time.

It's been a rewarding year...:-)

Poetry unit

2008-05-28T21:03:22Z

I've started a poetry unit at school with my students. Today we read and explicated some Walt Whitman, some Edna St. Vincent Millay, some Robert Herrick, some James Hetfield, and some David Gilmour. :-)

Many of the kids had never even heard "Comfortably Numb" before. Some really do think Flock of Seagulls is classic stuff. haha. Still, it's great fun watching them produce poetry and take a risk, reading in front of their peers.

I really enjoy teaching poetry. Currently, it's a unit within a larger semester course, but next school year we will run a new course, titled (creatively, haha) "Poetry" and from what I hear the sign-ups have been good. I'm really looking forward to teaching it. Watching kids develop and improve, and watching some of them become fledgling poets.

Many students often ask me these days why they need to learn meter and rhyme, since they've been told since kindergarten that freeverse is just as much poetry as anything else. I agree that it is, but I think that a poet should choose to use freeverse as one option, not choose freeverse because it is the only thing they know how to do.

I know that sounds pretentious of me, but the same goes with other creative endeavors, in my opinion. If you want to paint very abstract stuff that's fine, but I hesitate to refer to someone as an artist if they are incapable of painting within the context of something with more parameters; realism, impressionism, etc etc ad infinitem.

I have a hard time with the idea I guess that everyone is born a poet, or an artist, or a novelist, or a performer and that the intense labor, practice, and learning that used to go into become great and truly admirable no longer applies.

I'm old fashioned in this way...creative expression is not always artistically noteworthy. I know that's not politically correct in some circles, but I hope honesty still is.

K

krsj @ 2008-05-25T22:49:00

2008-05-26T02:56:56Z

Sometimes I wonder how I went from the high-tech corporate world back to teaching and also to writing.

Often people ask me about my background so I've decided to include a concise CV. If this is way more than you wanted, I apologize up front...

K

***CV REMOVED***

waiting....

2008-05-24T12:02:19Z

An agent who recently sold a debut novel written by another teacher for six figures in a pre-empt has asked to look at the first 50 of my new novel Burgess. An editor at Corwin Press has sent out my nonfiction manuscript to their readers to get reactions.

This is a fun part of writing, but it is also a tough part, since there is NOTHING to do right now but wait. Every time an email comes in, or the phone rings, it could be really cool news or it could be "it really doesn't fit" etc etc.

I could send out more poetry, or I could work on some short fiction. I could be working on the residency materials for Stonecoast MFA, or at least selecting which sessions I'll attend, but I'm waiting for definitive and official clarification on the whole "the session only counts if it has required reading" issue.

It could be quite a while before I hear anything, a month even, so I have to find something to do other than waiting.

Still, right now the possibilities are endless, so it's a fun time.

Birthdays

2008-05-21T23:19:21Z

Okay, I want to hear from folks...
My birthday is July 26, 1968. As old as some of you are now thinking I am, I'm even older than that. It's not the year you were made, but the mileage that matters, and I have a ton of mileage on me. I'm old, fat, and broken. Other than that, I'm fine though. :-)

I don't know if it is a function of getting older and becoming more fixated with my b-day, but I've come to notice who was born on the same day as I was. I'll share some of those born on the same day as I was, and you comment with some of yours, ok?

Here we go... July 26ers I find noteworthy...

Alfred Marshall
George Bernard Shaw
Carl Jung
Andre Maurois
Aldous Huxley
Blake Edwards
Stanley Kubrick
Mick Jagger
Helen Mirren
Rick Bragg (I'll be presenting something written by Rick at one of my workshops at Stonehouse)
Kevin Spacey
Sandra Bullock
Jeremy Piven
Olivia Williams (same day and year haha)
Kate Beckinsale (man, is she beautiful, and wicked smaht)
Gael Clichy (so, yah, I love soccer)

I really dig this mix of people.
I hope you'll share some of your lists...

I can see some of me in a lot of these people... cynic, need for attention, survivor of stuff I'd have rather done without, a need to create, a need to spin tales, a sense of always falling a bit short of what I was trying to do, trying harder next time, having a sense of humor about the whole thing...

I see stuff here that I wish I had, but that list would sound maudlin and self-piteous (is that a word? even hyph?) Anyway, the list is for fun, so have fun and share.

PS-The first person who writes, "Hey! You'll be 40 this year!" gets blocked or whatever...haha

The Gargoyle

2008-05-19T21:13:50Z

I posted this on my regular blog http://northofeverything.blogspot.com/, but I'm feeling it's worth posting here too...

I've started reading an advance copy of a debut novel by Andrew Davidson titled "The Gargoyle"

It will be hitting bookstore shelves in August 2008 I believe.

I'm not far along, but I'm hooked. I'm really enjoying Davidson's narrative style and story. I think the book is going to do well and will be one of those "everyone is talking about it" titles.

Here's what Sara Gruen said about it: “I was blown away by Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle. It reminded me of Life of Pi, with its unanswered (and unanswerable) contradictions. A hypnotic, horrifying, astonishing novel that manages, against all odds, to be redemptive."

Here's a product description from the publisher (I think):
"The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide—for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul. A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged, sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health. As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to life—and, finally, in love. He is released into Marianne's care and takes up residence in her huge stone house. But all is not well. For one thing, the pull of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive. For another, Marianne receives word from God that she has only twenty-seven sculptures left to complete—and her time on earth will be finished."

Anyway...from what I've read so far...I recommend it.

krsj @ 2008-05-01T13:06:00

2008-05-01T17:10:28Z

I post on another blog... so I'm posting this only because I promised (sort of) Erin I would :-)
I'm new to using LJ in this way, so I know almost no one. Still, I fulfilled my obligation. :-)

A short meme via e_underwood

Comment and I'll...
1. Tell you why I friended you.
2. Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a colour, a photo, etc.
3. Tell you something I like about you.
4. Tell you a memory I have of you.
5. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
6. Tell you my favorite user pic of yours.
7. In return, you must post this in your LJ.

My usual blog is at North of Everything