Plato, Phaedrus 274e-275a (go here for the full dialogue) Socrates is telling a story of the invention of writing in Egypt “When it came to the written letters, Theuth said, ‘This training, King, will make Egyptians wiser and will give them stronger memories: for it is a drug for memory and wisdom!’ But the king […]
via Students without Teaching: Against Illiterate Literacy — SENTENTIAE ANTIQUAE
For those who don’t know, today is International Literacy Day. Created by UNESCO’s General Conference in 1966, the purpose of this event is to raise awareness of the important of literacy in communities around the globe. According to one website, 16% of the world’s population, two thirds of them girls, are unable to read or […]
Jennifer is writer. She does not struggle with ideas. She takes a mini-lesson and tries it out in her writing. When presented with the Classroom Slice of Life Challenge this past April. She wrote in school, at home and she told me all about her writing when I would pass her in the halls. During […]
When I was very young, I clearly remember not speaking a word of English. My older brothers would laugh and ask my mum, “What did Viv just say?” I thought they were the odd ones. Needless to say, my mum- being a teacher herself, fixed everything. I read the entire ‘Jack and Jill series, as well as […]
Some time ago, I had an interesting conversation with a Ghanaian Christian doctor. He told me about a young doctor he met. When he learned that the young doctor was from the Upper West Region, he asked him if his parents were literate. He asked because Upper West Region has significant poverty rates and low […]
Every year, my school hosts Literacy Lunch. It is a time for families to come share in the love of reading, writing, and learning in classrooms, followed by a meal together in our cafeteria. Literacy Lunch has sometimes been a vehicle for explaining English Language Arts curriculum, and shifts in standards, to parents. Mostly it’s […]
from David Carr’s book on literacy and the creation of literature in the ancient world: … many ancient texts were not written in such a way that they could be read easily by someone who did not already known them well. Indeed, classicists long ago noted that the oldest Greek manuscripts, written as they are […]
via What the Earliest Forms of Literacy Looked Like — Human Pages
Last year, I created a Literacy Calendar – something I’d wanted to sink my teeth into for a long time. I’ve always felt it would be one of those things that’s incredibly useful to have and to share with staff, yet something we rarely have time to research or create! It proved so popular amongst […]
Over the course of Memorial Day weekend, I found myself off in the woods of the Berkshire Mountains, teaching workshops on geomancy and palace of memory. I think a lot more people are interested in me teaching geomancy, going into the future, but I find that I want to spend more time on palace of […]
As a side note, I think I’m going to use the attached image as the key image for all of my posts about Palace of Memory techniques; it’ll take me a while to retro-fit all prior posts with this image, but I’ll be working on it. In my last post, I noted that I’d created […]
via Magic: The Daily Orphic Hymns — Wanderings in the Labyrinth
What if psychic training isn’t about beefing up your skills, so much as massaging over-tensed muscles back to flexibility?
In 1906, Dutch writer Maarten Maartens—acclaimed in his lifetime but now mostly forgotten—published a surreal, satirical novel called The Healers. The book centers on one Professor Lisse, who has conjured up a potential bioweapon: the Semicolon Bacillus, an “especial variety of the Comma.” The doctor has killed hundreds of rabbits demonstrating the Semicolon’s toxicity, but, at the…
via The Virtues of the Semicolon; or, Rebellious Punctuation — Literary Hub
Today, on the garbage website that controls our lives, some actually very good writing advice from author and editor Katherine May, which I present below without further comment: A note from a very weary editor, to all male writers: Women’s breasts are not communication devices. They are not sending you, or your male protagonists, encoded…
via Dear male writers: here’s how not to write about breasts. — Literary Hub
Es fühlt sich wirklich sehr merkwürdig an, diesen Beitrag zu schreiben. Im August habe ich so wenig gelesen wie selten in meinem Leben. Dementsprechend lohnt dieser Beitrag eigentlich kaum… Da ich euch aber ein wenig meine September-Pläne mitteilen möchte, schreibe ich ihn trotzdem! Was habe ich gelesen? Am Anfang des Monats habe ich Der Geschmack von…
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 