Author: Beth McCoy

I’ve been thinking about some of thoughtful responses and building-upons that emerged from the write-your-own-abecedarian poem exercise. At some level, that exercise was about both freedom and (some) constraint.

I’m sharing this graphic with you, which @hellomizk describes as follows:

#bythebones is a game of randomized constraints for anybody who wants to play with diary comics–whether you’ve been making them for years or have never tried but want to give it a go. Here are the instructions: please share widely and let’s draw!

h/t @savannahmillion, who along with @alexcox hosts Roboism, a podcast about how “robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are affecting our culture.”

Thinkers in today’s class referred to the pressure that many students feel to achieve “full” understanding of a text.

Even if such an achievement were possible, how would one know when “fullness” happened? Would a text go clunk like a gas pump does when the tank is full?

The question made me wonder how a gas pump knows to stop with that satisfying clunk. I’ve embedded a video below that offers an explanation. Keep it in mind as you read The Bacchae: I’m wondering if all this technical talk about pressure might help offer insight into the dynamics of Euripides’ hard-to-follow play!

“It’s incredible that a sentence is ever understood” is a line from narrator Thelonious Monk Ellison in Percival Everett’s Erasure. I mention the line a lot in classes, and its truth was driven home all over again in the first meeting of ENGL 101/431: Blackness, Love, and Justice.

In that class, we’re reading N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth, a trilogy that draws from the geological sciences. To get us thinking about geology and the characters we will meet, I asked everyone to answer the following question:

What’s your favorite rock? 

I had intended it to be a simple question, but as soon as it popped out of my mouth it became clear that thinkers interpreted it in many ways that I wasn’t anticipating at the time. And all of the interpretations made absolute sense.  Continue reading “Like a Rock”