teaching
-
Adjunct Faculty Plan Walk Out
Adjunct college faculty are at last taking a stand against abominable work conditions and low pay by planning a national walk out on February 25, 2015. Unlike their tenured counterparts, adjuncts lack protection from retributive firing should they follow through.…
-
Mountains, Lowlands, and Archipelagos
Horace Engdahl thinks that creative writing programs and the walled-off communities academic programs create are hurting western literature. Since writing courses help monetize writing—and fund writers as professionals—Engdahl worries that the courses are removing writers from the real world. Engdahl…
-
The Rumpus Interview with Julie Schumacher
Julie Schumacher discusses going extinct, iPads and iPhones, epistolary novels, and why the number of MFA programs in the U.S. is a non-issue.
-
Straight out of Kafka
All for a novel? Eighth grade school teacher Patrick McLaw was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education and is currently being investigated by the County’s Sheriff, James Phillips, who explained—somewhat cryptically—that McLaw is at a “location…
-
The Unteachable Dark
Writers Rivka Galchen and Zoë Heller, over at The New York Times, discuss the question that will never go away: can writing be taught? They raise valid points about whether teaching writing is fundamentally different from teaching something like science and the…
-
Teach the Class You Want to Take
You get bored if you don’t teach what you’re interested in, so in some ways you create a course you wish you would have taken. The Believer blog has an interview with author and teacher Matthea Harvey about how she…
-
Flannery O’Connor Can’t Be Tamed
This quote from Paul Lisicky in an essay at The Millions neatly sums up why it can be so difficult to teach Flannery O’Connor’s work: …it’s so easy to simplify O’Connor. Even sophisticated readers are prone to missing out on…
-
Not Writing to Write Better
Julia Fierro has a debut novel Cutting Teeth, but for much of the last decade, the writer was so dispirited by the rejection of her first manuscript that she stopped writing. Instead, she launched Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, a Brooklyn-based writing…
-
The Rumpus Book Club Interviews Hilton Als
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Hilton Als about his new collection White Girls, an intriguing amalgam of fiction, essay, and memoir.
-
The New York Comics Symposium: Brendan Leach and Nick Sousanis
The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Monday nights at 7-9 p.m. EST in New York City.
-
“Please Let It Go Okay”
Teaching is a complicated profession, especially in the field of creative writing where emotions run high. Does teaching hurt your writing? What if you’re an able writer but a mediocre teacher? Joyce Hinnefeld tackles her ambivalence about the job she’s…
-
I Was a Teenage Arsonist
My school was on fire. It was exhilarating. Fire trucks were whipping their sirens around, and my whole high school was out on the football field, chattering excitedly, whispering in little groups, because we were missing class, and oh my…