Rob Groves

Fat Lady Attempts to Get Health Care: An Oral History MEGAN TRASK (Front Desk Assistant, Sunshine Primary Care): I could tell from the minute she checked in that she was fat. Like, real fat. The crazie...

"I just wanted to get out of there. I asked about crutches for the walk home, but he gave me a bunch of weight loss pamphlets and a prescription for an appetite suppressant."

I firmly remember not being able to understand the dialect/accents of some of the characters in the Great Gatsby and my English Teacher looking at me like an idiot because I wasn't super familiar with a long island or jersey accent (as represented in writing). Audio would have helped.

Today’s xkcd made me cry.

In a good way.

xkcd.com/3172/

Of course, I started officially doing my job in mid August, and have been being paid in the meanwhile, so this has not been any real hardship, but it's so strange that ~30% of my contract is me working without a contract.

I am happy to report that as of October 30 (Thursday of Week 10 of the semester), I now have been offered the contract to start my job for the 2025–2026 academic year.

This is my 13th year here, and this is later than usual, but only by a couple weeks.
Not complaining, but it's real weird, no?

This is perhaps one of the most important things in this zone. If folks can think “άξιος” means worthy, great. But to be able to really work with it you need to know it’s an adjective and takes the +gen. Or inf. …

That doesn't mean you can't parse or talk about case usages, but if one wants to focus the at-home work on reading, I think it's important that they not arrive at class saying "I wish I had written out a translation." Class time can be used to push from gist-y reading to more careful analysis
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Finally, be sure you don't surprise them with gotcha questions on case usages etc. Most students at this stage are like kids with water wings or training wheels, they have to have faith that they won't get hurt if you remove the supports they've been relying on (writing out translations).

Make vocabulary work step 1. If they have 95% of the vocabulary, they can really read and should!; if not, they're necessarily going to have to do the lexicon work or have some supportnecessary before they can just sit and read.

I'd also say that one of the fundamentals required to do real "reading" as opposed to "translation" or "decoding" is understanding of the overwhelming amount of vocabulary, which students are highly unlikely to have with an ancient text is a 2nd or 3rd year class. So be prepared to scaffold or...

To start at least, I would give them VERY clear standards. e.g. Take no more than 1 hour. Write out the answers to these 5 questions: "Why doesn't the speaker like X" etc.? (The kinds of reading comprehension questions students might answer in late elementary school or even middle school).

Where I think we as instructors sometimes fall flat in these transitions is the assumption (when we already know better) that reading is one thing, as opposed to "reading for". Reading for a sense of the content vs. reading for the gist vs. reading for evaluating the argument vs. reading for fun...

Depending on whether the reading is done in class or at home, I might ask them to talk about or think about how they take notes and work to understand a challening piece of English reading. What are the levels of understanding? What is the goal of the reading?

This solves a practical problem besetting much of my own work

Congratulations~!

I think in part the higher education funding crisis and the LLM-teaching crisis actually strike at the same problem, which is that education doesn't work without a broad, society-wide sense that the *actual content* of education - not the credential - is valuable.

1.) Pretty rarely these days (but when I do start a new research project, I do).

2.) I wasn't aware it existed in hard copy. (Though I'm not shocked).

That this should be an aspect of education we are seeking to mechanize and externalize indicates a deep misunderstanding of what learning is and how it works with actual human beings in a classroom.

It just so happens to also frequently give students access to the wonder of style, self expression, and a certain access point to imagination, which are arguably much more valuable in personal and cultural contexts!

Writing, in an educational setting, is not essentially valuable bc of style or personal expression. It is fundamentally valuable bc it is the simplest possible method for students to externalize and reorganize a complicated thought pattern, which is necessary for any other complex task.

Most tantalizing explanation I’ve heard is a Homeric distortion of an equine-named, but lost to memory seige weapon used to breach the walls. (Cf. Onos etc.). When the memory of that tech was lost, people interpreted it as an actual horse.

I mean, yes. But also: Competitive Frenemies? Friends to enemies to lovers?

I mean. I don’t make them that way any more. But like. Yeah.

A Woman Who Left Society to Live With Bears Weighs in on “Man or Bear” In this piece, long-term bicycle traveler Laura Killingbeck reflects on the "Man or Bear" debate and adds her unique perspective...

This article is so good and packs so many killer lines that are so insightful that I literally could not decide on which to copy and paste here so just go read the whole thing.

Once again, McSweeney’s nails it. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-m...

What does it mean to be "student-centered"? Or, how is Latin like horseback riding? When I first heard the term "student-centered teaching," I recognized it as an apt description of what I had been doing instinctively. In general, it means shifting your focus from the content you're ...

New post on Humanist! I wanted a simple answer: who came up with "student-centered" teaching? So much more complicated, as it turns out. So much evidence to support it, yet it's not that common in higher ed...I have thoughts.
#Ancientbluesky
#Classicsbluesky
#TeachLearnSky
#Edusky

Fwiw, I give the GATs I supervise, my head, and my close collaborators either a phone number or a slack set up so that can get ahold of me near instantly. But students, more distant colleagues, and strangers may have to wait a day or two.

I haven't yet given up a day of the work week but I am quite confident the world would survive... but it takes a while to unlearn the "everything is high priority" mentality.

I haven't yet given up a day of the work week but I am quite confident the world would survive... but it takes a while to unlearn the "everything is high priority" mentality.