Comments on: Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Unless he has no idea how to clean and cook the stupid fish.

By: Danielle

Danielle — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 11:39:59 +0000

This quote needs information on it. o yes yes yes it does

By: Laura Padilla

Laura Padilla — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 15:32:56 +0000

Hi Steve– I found this blog when I was looking for your email address.
When I read this, I thought that this was actually such a missed opportunity. One of the more difficult parts of teaching literature is giving students a sense that there is this broader conversation going on outside the classroom. The criticism should do exactly what this article did for you– engage scholars both new and established. It is tricky, from a teacher’s perspective, to cover the required text and to encourage further exploration; it seems so sad to me that you had made the effort to make that engagement, and that you then stepped back from it out of fear of appearing to plagiarize.
In that situation, I hope that a student would bring the article to office hours, at which point we could discuss how to make use of the critical discourse without parrotting it. I would ask the student to explore the limitations of this line of thought: how old is this article? Is it manner of thinking outdated? Does it ignore critical elements of the novel? Who are the scholars that this author is engaging?
Sorry to be so long winded, but it does make an English professor a little sad to see my kind of fun nipped in the bud.

By: Jessy

Jessy — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 16:50:32 +0000

I know what you mean, and I tend to freeze up when students want me to stray into faculty turf and advise them on writing the paper. I’ve always considered that to be a good thing, but maybe it isn’t. It’s not like we don’t want faculty to ever, ever help students use databases — we just want them to involve us. So maybe it’s okay if we help them think about their argument. I suppose it’s the usual problem, we want to help them but not TOO much, we don’t want to do the project for them — for their own good and for ours. Still, when a totally lost first-year (or later!) student doesn’t even know where to begin, I should stop thinking of my hands as being tied. Asking a few leading questions, maybe with the assignment in front of us, could work.