When you are an English teacher, there are too many ways to teach. In the public view, you are teaching two really important skills: writing and reading. That’s a simplification. Teaching Language Arts is the cornerstone of being thoughtful, creative, patient, empathetic, revision/editing-oriented, network-seeking, analytical, open-minded, reflective, and well-spoken (or at least confident enough to…
Author: Thomas Joseph Wilson
Practicality Versus the Human Element; Or Why We Are Not Vulcans
I have been using a fictional race of human beings as an adjective lately. Because with technology where it is, we have more and more distinguished ourselves from a Vulcan lifestyle of logic. Let us pretend, by some trick of the universe, Vulcans replaced us right at this moment. It is night, and you climb…
Falling Back on Cereal
Before college, my life was littered with empty cereal bowls. This was largely the fault, and perhaps the triumph, of my mother. I ate cereal like one greedily gasps for air after running 1,000 miles per hour. Instead of lungs and air, it was cereal and stomach. Growing up, there was never any soda in…
What I Want to Say When Someone Asks Where I Am From
There was never one house or one place. I was born in a hospital in downtown Cincinnati and taken to my first home in the quaintness of Loveland. It is up to science to know if this place had any affect on me as I moved when I was two. I remember this next house…
The Slow Adoption of Digital Annotation
Up until my late 20s, I thought books were sacred objects that were ruined by creases and marks and the like. A book was there to be preserved so as to be enjoyed by later people. It’s a weird thing to think this when you have a book in your personal library, refuse to sell…
Attention Now
I think it’s fair to say that a staple of modern humanity is that we have these fads of going down paths of traditional tool rediscovery, back to making coffee without a machine or putting records on a turntable or driving a manual transmission car. Perhaps these activities are more impractical with today’s technology, but…
On Tapping with Thumbs
Tapping on screens ain’t so fancy. It’s pretty darn video-gamish. Something I’d never thought would ever help me in life. I used to lament the waste of muscular strength. My parents, I’m sure, did too. Nothing is worse than sitting in a spine-curved-cross-legged hump on the ground with the reflective gaze of the TV and…
Worrying about the Old Ways
Tennessee’s SB 1881 has quietly turned into law. It’s a traditions law, one that probably hits home to any student who has gone through elementary school until a few years ago: The course of instruction in all public schools shall include cursive writing so that students will be able to create readable documents through legible…