This is the blog of teacher47:
"Nobody leaves with a smooth surface. We rough up the consciousness, scrape the mold off young minds."
-Author Unknown

Friday, 20 November 2009

  • From Anna's Facebook status:

    "Stephen Colbert: 'I text allegiance to the flag of the United States of American Apparel and to the Facebook for which it friends, one nation, OMG, Indivizzibizzle, With Liberty and Jonas For All.' His 'Pledge 2.0' for the American Youth."

Thursday, 19 November 2009

Wednesday, 18 November 2009

  • shortest of the short?

    Hemingway's shortest short story, in six words:
    "For sale: Baby shoes. Never used."

    Oooooh.

    From the same *article, I discovered that Joyce Carol Oates has published 36 novels (with 3 more on the way); she has pieces in 33 short-story collections under the name Rosamond Smith (3 written as Lauren Kelly) and 8 novellas. In addition = 12 volumes of essays & criticisms, 8 plays, and 10 poetry books. Sheesh, almighty woman! AND SHE TEACHES (at Princeton).

    Some article quotes: "She seems to write like other people blog." "Writing is easy for Oates - some think too easy." "Isn't it [writing] supposed to be difficult, even for geniuses?" "The idea that creativity stops being creative if it happens to regularly: now there's something to make people uncomfortable with creative writing programs." "It's what keeps critics in business: there will always be something to write about."

    *"Get With The Program: Creative Writing in the Twentieth Century" by Richard Beck, found in The Harvard Advocate - Spring 09 - via Scribd.com...

  • How To Do What You Love.

    http://paulgraham.com/love.html

    "If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school."

    "    As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it."

    "    So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive." LIKE BLOG?

    "    The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?"

    "    This test is especially helpful in deciding between different kinds of academic work, because fields vary greatly in this respect. Most good mathematicians would work on math even if there were no jobs as math professors, whereas in the departments at the other end of the spectrum, the availability of teaching jobs is the driver: people would rather be English professors than work in ad agencies, and publishing papers is the way you compete for such jobs. Math would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. No one does that kind of thing for fun." = I think he's incorrect here. I write this blog knowing that no one will read it... it doesn't stop me from writing. Literature freaks would say the same thing, I'm sure.

    "    It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don't underestimate this task. And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented, you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably." = Again, I disagree, but I'm in academia. I'm surrounded by many who love their jobs... although, I suppose there are less of them and more of those who should be in other careers. It's close though; my estimation would be 55% love & 45% denial.

    "    "Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof."
  • From Kailey's Facebook status:

    "But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period."

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

by e.e. cummings

  • Visit teacher47's Xanga Site
    • Name: Sybil
    • State: North Dakota
    • Birthday: 1/25/1977
    • Member Since: 5/9/2002
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LIFE OUTSIDE THE BLOG:
cool stuff:
-etymology online
-the chronicle of higher ed
-weblogg-ed
-kairos
-owl at purdue

cool blogs:
-wade's blog
-kevin's blog

hobbies:
-my fashion blog
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER:
>Naked, When You Are Engulfed In Flames, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Holidays On Ice by David Sedaris
>Are You There Vodka, It's Me, Chelsea by Chelsea Handler
>Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
>You Just Don't Understand by Deborah Tannen
>Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
>Animal Farm by George Orwell
>Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
>Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
>The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
>Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
>Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
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"On the whole human beings want to be good,
but not too good,
and not quite all the time."
- George Orwell