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....