Tag Archive | "review"
Leslie Vernon Deconstructs the Slasher
I’d seen Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon a while ago, but had a chance to watch it again recently. I enjoyed this slasher satire for many of the same reasons I enjoyed the first Scream: both are meta-slasher films that use humor to deconstruct the genre while still serving as examples of [...]
Continue reading...The Classic Fairy Tales
Friday, August 27, 2010
The Classic Fairy Tales by Maria Tatar My rating: 5 of 5 stars on Goodreads This is an excellent collection of fairy tales. The editors collect variations of the more popular tales and group them for comparison. The tales include Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, and many others. The work [...]
Continue reading...The Meaning of Independence
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Morgan, Edumnd S. The Meaning of Independence. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978. I think the brevity of the essays work against the purpose of the text. This is a thin volume, so it wouldn’t be fair for me to criticize it for a lack of depth. That said, I expected this to [...]
Continue reading...Defining Horror – Noël Carroll
Friday, May 28, 2010
One of the seminal theoretical works on horror is Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror.1 In this work, Carroll explores answers to two major questions related to the genre: Why are we disturbed by fictions?2 And why do we seek out fictions that disturb us? Through the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, and literary theory, Carroll [...]
Continue reading...The Spirit of the Revolution
Thursday, April 16, 2009
I’ve been reading Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers, a book that’s been on my shelf for a while, and I’m fascinated by the echoes between the struggles this nation faced in its early years and the ones it faces now. In chapter one, Ellis explains that America was founded in the conflict between the opposing principles [...]
Continue reading...The Public Domain
Thursday, December 11, 2008
I’ve just started reading James Boyle’s The Public Domain, thanks to recent mention on the BoingBoing blog. If Cory Doctorow is to be believed (and he is), then it’s an important book and a good read. What I’ve seen so far confirms that. I’m encouraged by Boyle’s optimism, his assertion that this issue is important [...]
Continue reading...Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter by Barry H. Lopez My rating: 5 of 5 stars on Goodreads This is one of the definitive collections of Coyote tales. Lopez not only collects great stories and tells them with an engaging voice, he also provides an insightful introduction. The stories reveal the complex, often-contradictory [...]
Continue reading...Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Friday, March 23, 2007
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault My rating: 5 of 5 stars on Goodreads This book strongly affected my thoughts about education, actually. The ways in which power is exerted through surveillance and control of the body, and the negative affects of this, are everywhere apparent in schools. In particular, [...]
Continue reading...Making a Bad Date
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
On the list of things you’re not supposed to talk about on a first date, religion sits at number one … and for obvious reasons. Disagreements can get nasty and irrational, and in most cases, nobody is going to say anything original anyway–much of the talk that surrounds the topic is poorly-imitated and poorly-informed recycled [...]
Continue reading...Recent Posts (view all)
-
In the Set of All Factors, Money Wins
This chart pretty clearly illustrates the correlation between student performance and socio-economic status: I have no interest in defending ineffective teachers, but we also have to talk honestly about what schools can and can’t do to help students. I don’t doubt that the effectiveness of a teacher is the single largest factor in determining a [...]
-
The Impermanence of Digital
Simon Winchester, commenting on the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary won’t be reprinted and future editions will only be available in digital formats: The printed book is about to vanish at extraordinary speed … Books are about to vanish; reading is about to expand as a pastime; these are inescapable realities. In practical and environmental [...]
-
It’s Popular because It’s Easy
Marion Brady presents two theories of learning and suggests that the one currently driving reform is based on the notion that learning is all about transferring information from books and teachers into the empty brains of students. No research says how much of what’s recalled at test time remains permanently in memory, nor to what [...]
The content of this site, written by Eric Hoefler, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Friday, August 27, 2010
0 Comments