Three Gratitudes: 1. chiropractors everywhere. 2. Special K Powerbars; they taste great and have 10 grams of protein. 3. “good” students — those who actually put forth the effort. There are many of them and I often forget about them in my culture shock. ∞

Today in class, students were supposed to bring an editorial from a newspaper. More than half the students didn’t know what an editorial was or where to find it. What kind of education system do we have in this state? When students can’t tell the difference between an editorial and a news article, I get scared. I’m not talking about the more sophisticated position that questions the difference between information and persuasion, either: “there’s no such thing as information; all information is perspectival.” The students simply didn’t know the kinds of writing in a newspaper. It means that our educational system is not teaching studentsRead More →

From deep in the heart of Gen Y in higher ed: It’s time to rethink teaching public speaking, though with deeply mixed feelings. Do I teach to the new, more visual, more “parallel” (rather than linear) thinkers? Or do I try to drag them to the 19th century way of thinking, as Kathleen Jamieson would have us do in Eloquence in an Electronic Age. It’s a puzzle.

In The Advocate online the morning, one of the editorials ended with a -30-. That’s unusual. Usually, the -30- gets edited out before the article goes to press or gets loaded up online. It made me nostalgic for my journalism days. I don’t recall if my journalism teachers ever said exactly why you’re supposed to end an article with -30-. So, using the handy dandy internet, I looked it up. According to this nifty article from the American Journalism Review, no one knows how the tradition got started and what it symbolizes, but there are some neat speculations. Maybe my teacher just didn’t care toRead More →

Some of the key sites we saw in Dublin include the Guinness Storehouse, which was a fairly fantastic place. As expected, it walks the tourist through the stages of making Guinness. There is a taste-test room where you can get a shot of Guinness (I skipped the shot), and then there is a rooftop bar filled with tourists drinking the brew. From the 360 degree room of the bar, you can see just about every little bit of Dublin and then some beyond. We also saw the Book of Kells at Trinity College, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Christ Church. Christ Church has a huge collectionRead More →