English 100 at Ashland

Right now, most of the world is racing off to buy clothes for the Fall. That’s OK and pretty understandable—you are about to begin a new enterprise and you would like to look your best. As you plan your shopping trips, here are a few things to remember: Your classes are not all in the same building, so several times a week, you will be power-walking from one place to another. You need decent, comfortable shoes. North-central Ohio weather is somewhat unpredictable and can be cold and wet. Those comfortable shoes should be able to survive a bit of snow and water. You would be wise to get a hat and gloves. Whatever style you wore in high school will work just fine here. Even your high school letter jacket. You won’t have that much space to store things; on the other hand, you probably want more underwear than you had in high school because you might not get around to doing your laundry too of...

We are halfway through the summer (about six weeks until classes begin at Ashland), and if you are like me, you have not done much thinking about college yet. We need to begin getting our brains back into gear though. Quality reading this summer will help you a lot, and it does not have to be school stuff. In fact, it shouldn’t be. I am about halfway through Fahrenheit 451, and I admit that it is sometimes heavy going. It does stretch one’s mind, a good thing to do. You might prefer a collection of short stories. Write an actual paper letter to someone. We will be doing a lot of in-class handwriting this Fall, so you might as well get into practice. The Post Office can sell you an envelope if you do not have one. You know that you will need some preparation for Fall: new clothing, getting the computer fixed, etc. Might as well do it now and do it gradually. (If your computer needs service, you don...

Any time I tell someone I teach college English, I get the same question. Not “How do you get through reading all those papers?” Not “Are students less prepared than they used to be?” Not even “Freshmen are a fun bunch, aren’t they?” No, the question is always “What are you doing about Artificial Intelligence?” It’s a fair question, and it’s being asked on every college campus in the country. Before I get around to answering it, I want to deal with a couple of other questions. Why is A.I. so appealing? I don’t think most of my students sat down in April and said to themselves, “I think I’ll cheat my way through college.” The problem, though, is that many high schools have not done much with teaching students how to actually write things (your teachers may not have known either), and then you get to college and you’re in ...

One of my little projects this summer is finding some music to fill the ten minutes or so before the class begins. I have used YouTube “Ambient Music” in the past, but it is often computer-generated and forgettable. This time around I am looking for some genuine quality. It would be nice to do themes, about a week long. Perhaps one week of Beethoven and another of very young musicians and another of opera in public places. Maybe one of bluegrass and one of stride piano. I have a couple of reasons for doing this. One is that I believe an “educated person” knows more than simply how to punctuate a sentence correctly, and this is a great moment to broaden your horizons. (A while back, I used a movement from Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” for “gap music.” One of my students commented that it is now his favorite piece.) The other is that I think a good teacher transmits more than facts: I want to invite y...

I first ran into this Ray Bradbury novel when I was in high school—a very long time ago. Recently, when I was buying a graduation gift for a granddaughter, I was browsing the shelves at Barnes & Noble and saw a 60th anniversary edition on the shelf. Just had to get it. (I think I have an older paperback copy somewhere, but this book seemed to deserve my time.) The title of the book refers to the temperature at which book paper bursts into flame. The book is set in some distant future when all the houses are fireproof and the government wants to control everything people think, so one of the best strategies is to burn books. Firemen (the book’s central character is a fireman.) no longer have water in the tanks of their fire trucks. They have kerosene. And their job, if anyone is suspected of owning books, is to go to the home of the offender and burn everything in sight. I remember reading this as a teenager and never really recovering ...

I’m sure you have noticed that we are setting records for high temperatures. You might not be able to avoid the heat (I remember one very hot summer in St. Louis when I worked in a shipyard and the temperature would drop to 85 at night!), but here are a couple of suggestions. First, of course, get plenty of water. Second, if you are able, do your outdoor stuff in early morning or very late evening. (No distance bike rides for me for a while.) And now one of the best suggestions: find a book or collection of short stories to read and hide out in some cool place, perhaps the basement. County libraries are usually air conditioned (and so is the Ashland U library). I will keep feeding you reading suggestions. (My latest book is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Absolutely excellent.)

More shade-tree reading from Project Gutenberg. These are all free downloads—free because they are old enough to have gone out of copyright and become public domain. Later I'll probably suggest some that you must pay for, but I really like the idea of something for nothing. Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers (This is the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey murder mysteries. I don't think the others are available in public domain, but if you like this one, you can certainly buy the rest online from Barnes & Noble or Amazon.) Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott (This is a very political science fiction about a world that only exists in two dimensions. There's no thickness to anything, only length and breadth. Yes, that really was the author's name.) Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K....

A little background I think most of us would benefit from keeping some sort of daily journal. Besides giving an opportunity to practice writing and giving a documented space to remember things, my journal functions like Professor Dumbledore’s Pensieve—a place where I can drop thoughts and clear my mind, but perhaps return to them in the future. I had a lot of trouble getting my journal started when I began several years ago, but then I remembered a writer’s trick: I needed to construct an audience . I needed some sense that I was actually writing to someone. For me, that constructed audience was my children, who might dig this book out of the closet after my death and figure out what on earth I had been thinking and doing. Now that I am rolling on the journal, I guess the journal itself is my audience, but not in the “Dear Diary” sense. (If that works for you, fine!) I got the picture above from the Internet—...

I was sitting at Panera this morning, writing, as usual, in my journal. And, as usual, some stranger took the opportunity to sit down and chat. Now, you can do almost anything at Panera without attracting attention (knit, read a book, have an argument on your phone), but the minute you try writing something with a fountain pen, you attract attention. At least I do. It’s like someone is performing brain surgery with a butter knife. People are amazed that it is even possible. That’s fascinating because we are not that far removed from a time when absolutely every well-organized adult had a fountain pen. (Probably the 1950s.) My mother had a pen in her purse, filled with purple ink. My father had one for signing important documents, filled (of course) with blue-black. I got through high school with a series of cheap pens filled with cheap blue ink. Banks had fountain pens in holders for people to write checks. (Ballpoints were kind of unreliable....

Right now you are signing a lot of documents—loan papers and such. They seem like annoying formalities that just don’t mean that much. Trust me. They do mean that much. You need to read them carefully and get someone to explain them to you if you do not understand what you are signing. Take your time. Don’t let anyone stampede you. Ask your parents if they have a safe deposit box at their bank, and if they do, the loan documents belong there. At the very least get one of those accordion file folders, and keep your copy of everything you sign. If you are uncertain about what all that paperwork means, you would certainly be wise to get a second professional opinion. (The first place I would ask would be my bank—unless they are the ones loaning me the money!) By the way, you will also want to keep your textbook receipts from the college bookstore so you can return the book if you bought the wrong one or your schedule changes. ...

First, a couple of sad truths Years ago, before you were in school, someone in the Ohio Department of Education (or some similar government office) decided that computers were THE thing of the future, so they stopped teaching elementary school children how to write. I see the result every time I teach a class. If I give a quiz, there is a general panic because several of my students showed up for a college class without paper or pen. Nobody is taking notes, so if I say something in a lecture, they have no way to remember it. If I write something on the board, several people will stand up and take pictures of it with their phones because they lack the equipment and skill to write it down. That’s sad. It’s like these students never got beyond the first or second grade. (I understand, by the way, that Ohio has realized how foolish it was to stop teaching handwriting, and they are putting it back into the school...

The books I am recommending from Project Gutenberg are all “Public Domain.” This means that their copyright has expired and anyone can download them or print them out legally. It also means that they are fairly old (because copyright extends for the author’s life plus seventy years). I was reading The War of the Worlds last night and realized a couple of things. For one, all those place names flew over my head because I never lived in rural England, and for another the author occasionally dropped a word on me that I just did not know. (Yes, even English teachers have limits on their vocabulary.) What to do? As for the place names, I let them sort of flow over me. Wells knows where things are, and it doesn’t matter much to me what was the name of the place where the Martians landed. Looking all that up would interrupt the flow of the story. Vocabulary is a somewhat different matter. The book was published in England 129 ye...

Summer is a great time for some relaxed reading. Hang out with friends? Go to the movies? Swimming pool? Shoot a few hoops? Expedition to the mall? Sure, but sometimes your brain just wants to chill. There’s only so much Facebook and Twitter that you can stand, and the evening news is plain depressing. I’m going to suggest a few books to read. Your local library is a great resource, but these are available free online so you can take them with you on your laptop or phone. These are all from Project Gutenberg , which is the home of an incredible number of great books, all free and legal. Onward we go, in no particular order (these are a few titles that came to mind as I threw this item together—I’m certain I will think of others later): The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (The original murder mystery author) Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (Long before there was a Captain J...

It’s still really early to be thinking of buying a computer, but I know some of you have generous relatives who would love to get you a graduation gift. Fine! Let them! If they want to buy you a new computer, more power to them! For the rest of us, some early advice: If you have a faithful machine that got you through high school, it will almost certainly be just fine for college. All those stickers on the lid are sort of reassuring and give you a sense of being at home. (I will give you advice later for getting Old Faithful ready for the Fall Semester.) Both Apple and Windows computers work very well at Ashland. I use Apple all the time and switch to Windows when I borrow space in the office next door. On the other hand, Chromebooks are not quite enough here. If you already have one, it will get you through our English class, but if you are buying a new machine, look elsewhere. I would avoid the big, expensive gami...

I’m writing this as the semester wraps up. People ask me how I will be spending the summer, and my answer usually disappoints them. It might be fun to go to Paris or London, but, all things considered, I am more likely to travel to Paris, Kentucky, or London, Ohio. (Nice town. Had friends who lived there.) If you are like most of us, you will get a summer job, hang out with friends, and try to pull yourself together for college in the Fall. Here are some suggestions for the next few weeks. Two things are in the back of my mind. The first is that I want these ideas to be low-impact and inexpensive. The second is that I want them to be fun. They should also help you with the getting-ready task: most college instructors will tell you that they would like their students to be better at reading and writing, so maybe summer would be a good time to work on those things as well. First suggestion: Get a library card. Summer is a great time for shade-tree readin...

In 1939, movie-goers were hit with an amazing spectacle. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her little dog Toto were swept up by a tornado and blown into the magical land of Oz. Until the moment when she opens the door of the cabin and sees where she landed, every movie was in black-and-white, but when she opens the door, suddenly she is in a land where everything is in brilliant, vivid color. And Dorothy says to her little dog: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.” College might feel that way. It will be a huge change, but it will be a good one. (After all, Oz was in full color!) I will be writing this blog throughout the summer to help you adjust and get ready for this new land. A few details about this blog: This isn’t an official AU site, and everything here is my own opinion. Because it’s not an AU site, anybody on the Internet can read it, so if you have a friend who is in another English class—perhaps even...