start off with the answer?

I was just skimming this post of mine from last year about the pedagogical and cognitive limitations of PowerPoint presentations. The research suggested that
the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digest in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time.
I concluded with this note:
Professor Sweller [...]

yikes, should I change my blog name?

I just came across the word “cultivated” in an article I’m reading, and it just now occurred to me that there’s a definition of “cultivated” — as “educated” or “refined” — that I definitely didn’t mean when I entitled my blog “Cultivated Pages.”
I don’t know why this other definition didn’t occur to me until today [...]

Phoenix lands on Mars tomorrow!

Okay, here’s something that could easily distract me from my work. Cool.
NASA’s updates are here.

note to self re pardoner paper

Note to self: Don’t forget to counter the view among a couple (?) of Pardoner critics that he was punished, or did feel the consequences of his hypocrisy (or a deeper sin?). I think it is the critics bringing in Augustine who say this. But I would answer that there is no sign of the [...]

notes from my meeting today with Lisa

The counter-argument (religion should not be allowed in the writing classroom) is unstated, implicit, and it grows out of the argument against the personal (probably). There’s a certain political correctness (i.e., no religion allowed) implicit.
An outline: Here’s the question, here’s why it’s important to the field and to me. Here’s how it has and [...]

slow freewriting on my thesis… religion un-make-critical-able?

Critical review of issue, like Lisa’s Audience article — may be exactly what’s needed, especially if the response of many in the field is “Well, of course, religion ought not to be excluded — as an identity alongside race, gender, age, culture, class, location, political views, etc, and as a massively crucial issue in the [...]

notes from my conversation with Chris this afternoon re my thesis

Notes from my conversation with Chris this afternoon about my thesis.
James L. Kinneavy’s Greek Rhetorical Origins of Christian Faith: An Inquiry (New York: Oxford UP, 1987).
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1873788.pdf
http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/oct1988/v45-3-bookreview8.htm
Steven L. Carter’s Culture of Disbelief
David Tracy’s Plurality and Ambiguity (re Augustine and composition studies both emphasizing meaning as thick, relative)
Compare Christian social justice with Composition’s service learning?
Lisa’s Situating Composition: [...]

scriptura creatio ex nihilo

Whew, I feel as if I didn’t get much done this weekend, even though I finally came up with a workable and original thesis and an outline for my Pardoner paper. And that’s A LOT. It often takes me a long time to get that, and once I do, it feels like down-hill from there. [...]

subconscious pedagogy

Okay, I had this dream a couple weeks ago. But get this: I dreamt that I was teaching WR121 (first-year writing) and I required the students to write their whole papers with only one sentence pattern. That’s right: every sentence was to have the same sentence pattern. I even felt happy about it, as if [...]

Chaucer came to our Writing Center staff meeting

At our last writing assistant staff meeting (last Thursday), I had the idea to have them read a section of one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in middle English. I had noticed, when I was reading the middle English myself this quarter, that (of course) my comprehension would fade in and out, like a radio losing [...]