I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced comedy so good it feels like a heroin flop, but that is exactly what Bad Teacher did for me. And sure, it’s 2 a.m. and I’m not normally up this late. (Did you know there are people out at this hour? Wearing hot pants and making out on [...]
Archive for June, 2011
Why This Former Teacher Is Looking Forward to Bad Teacher
June 23, 2011I can hardly wait for Friday’s release of Bad Teacher, and not just because I’ve been called the “poor man’s Cameron Diaz.” If they do it right, watching Diaz’s teacher be horrible to students could rival watching Billy Bob Thornton’s Santa be horrible to children. Here’s hoping. (On a related note, I had an interesting [...]
Adventures at the Texas Writers’ League Literary Agents Conference
June 16, 2011Regarding this blog, and writing in general, I’ve had the following conversation about a billion times: New Acquaintance: So, what do you write about? Me: Education, mostly. New Acquaintance: Oh, do you teach? Me: Uh, no. Used to, though. New Acquaintance: Like high school? Me: No, college level. New Acquaintance: Where? Me: Vanderbilt. New Acquaintance: [...]
Doing It The Right Way
June 8, 2011I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but given the recent bummers in eduction (crazy profiteering Brits, death of tenure certified), I thought it was a a good time to point out that there are people out there doing things right. Here’s one example: Econ Stories, a site responsible for a couple [...]
Doing Things the Wrong Way
June 7, 2011An alert reader brought this to my attention: a new, hideously expensive for-profit university scheme in Britain. Though I did call for self-supporting humanities, this is not what I meant at all. This is people who already have a lot of money charging other people with a lot money up the nose to bask in [...]
Pulling the Plug
June 3, 2011Recently, someone wrote in saying they felt I had no hope. I thought that was obvious already, but just in case… A while a ago there was an NYT article about ‘adjunct’ lawyers. To me this was further proof that higher ed is DOA. And yet I see so many of my former students flocking [...]