Fact or Fiction: Length Doesn’t Matter?

Let me tell you about the days when I feel most like a failure of an English teacher.  They are typically centered around literature—the canon, because our syllabus knows no other option.  These texts are challenging: Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, and Macbeth are the only three mentioned by name in the twelfth grade curriculum.  Apart from [...]

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Rhetoric makes my head spin

I’m not going to pretend to be intelligent for the sake of my pride – I have never understood rhetoric, and I still don’t. I thought that Berlin would help, but he didn’t – he just made it a whole lot worse.
I didn’t have any rhetoric classes in college and I haven’t had any as [...]

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Divided We Fall

Based on McComiskey’s introduction, this book is clearly designed—apart from its intention to introduce us, the students, to the various disciplines within English Studies—to the potential for interdisciplinarity within those same English fields.  To put it mildly, I agree.  I believe I have tried to do just that in my own English classroom; I may [...]

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