Seamus Heaney's Passing

I didn't know poetry very well before I read Heaney.

I didn't understand its challenge or its role. Then some poets in California introduced me to Heaney.

Since then I've found The Stolen Child, At the Fishhouses, and The Red Wheelbarrow... to name a few.

He changed the way many listen to words.

Lovecraftian Pre-writing

A "page" from Lovecraft's notes on At the Mountains of Madness was posted on Slate's Vault yesterday.

A lovely - if not slightly disturbing - reminder of how much chaos goes into pre-writing.

 Fun stuff.

Assessing the Professors

This TechCrunch article has its flaws, but it prompts an interesting question: 

If we were able to devise an assessment of the quality of a university professor's teaching, what would that assessment look like?

I know we'd mess it up if we designed the measures in today's political atmosphere - one that stresses a very limited version of job-readiness. 

But what if we scholars were able to devise their own assessment system for how well we teach?

Side note:

I followed the link to this TechCrunch article, because its title suggests the existence of a labor union for professors.

That seemed unlikely.

Turns out that the author mislabeled the American Association of University Professors, which is a professional association. There is a union component called the AAUP-CBC, but that is not the group that issued the statement on performance based funding.