teaching



What the Job Is: Notes on Racism and the Cultural Divide

My plan to start teaching phonetics in my Korean English class actually germinated in Nepal. I began to notice signs similar to ones I had seen in Korea, toting the English language as a kind of educational panacea. I found myself wondering if the modern world was engaged in a cultural war, an effort to arm itself with my mother tongue. A policy of Mutually Assured Comprehension.

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The Death of Poetry in Australian Classrooms

In 1982 Neil Postman first noted that the concept of childhood was disappearing in his book, The Disappearance of Childhood. It's highly unlikely that we'll be saying anything new if we claim that poetry is disappearing from the classroom. And though it is, and has been doing so for decades, poetry itself survives. It's just going to other places. To the small press, to cafes, to cyberspace, even to public transport. Perhaps, if we want poetry to be heard and read in other places too, our society needs to bring it back to schools.

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