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Ted Lasso, and the Fantasy of Soft Masculinity

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Ted Lasso, and the Fantasy of Soft Masculinity

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Ted Lasso, and the Fantasy of Soft Masculinity - NYT

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Email: jenny@erinkentconsulting.com

Linked In: Jenny Killion

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1. Analysis in the Wild

2. Toward a New Understanding of Analysis

3. The Essential Tools of Analysis

4. Exploring Passion

5. Exploring Ideas

6. Exploring Structure

7. Exploring Authority

8. Movie and Television Analysis

9. Music Analysis

10. Sports Analysis

11. Video Game Analysis

12. Literary Analysis

13. Gathering Your Own Resources

This book is written to help you plan instruction that supports the development of writers, specifically writers who are analyzing texts. The book is organized into three parts. Part 1 is an immersion into analytical writing that is current, authentic, and relevant to the students we teach today. We'll use the language of exploration to frame a new way of thinking about analysis. This process of analyzing a text is not unlike an explorer setting sail in search of a new land-a metaphor we'll draw on throughout this book to emphasize the discovery that is possible when students analyze texts of their own choosing. Sections 2 and 3 each begin with their own introduction. Section 2 is your lesson book - your guide to helping students find and explore and write about texts they love. Section 3 promises to be dog-eared and worn by the time you're finished with it. Each chapter is jam-packed with our absolute favorite mentors, mentor texts, and "cheat sheets" for supporting students who are analyzing texts you've never heard of.

With samples throughout the book, you will see what students of all levels and experiences can do when they're invited into the world of authentic analysis and supported with mentor texts, targeted writing instruction, and the opportunity to write about their passions.

This book is for teachers who want to revive the art of analytical writing in their classrooms-from teachers of middle-grade writers who are making their first foray into analytical writing to teachers of experienced twelfth-grade writers who are looking ahead to college where their professors will expect much, much more. In this book, we invite you to explore your teaching of analytical writing from a new perspective. To open your mind to the real world of analytical writing and challenge traditional notions about what students should be analyzing and how they should write. In short, we invite you to arrive where you started and know it for the first time-and to share this journey with your students and celebrate the writing that is born where passion and analysis meet.

- Introduction

"English teachers have been waiting for this book since...well...forever. Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O'Dell breathe new life into that semi-comatose assignment-the analytic essay. They ask us to totally reimagine it, to examine how analysis works "in the wild" -on blogs, web sites, Internet reviews, and to expand the range of "texts" students can analyze (music, video games, sports teams, movies). Then drawing on their own classroom work, they show how students can use the lessons from mentor texts in their own writing. A groundbreaking and absolutely essential book." -Thomas Newkirk, author of Embarrassment and Minds Made for Stories

"Are you ready for a mind-bending journey into analytical writing? This book holds a new vision for student engagement grounded in current, authentic, and relevant texts. I guarantee it will upend your understanding of analysis. Full of sentence and passage studies that ignite student voice, mini-lessons that clarify the intent of organizational structures, and a deep understanding of how best to learn from a mentor text, this book will make you a better writing teacher. It's simply brilliant."-Penny Kittle, author of Book Love and coauthor of 180 Days

"Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O'Dell take the dusty skeleton of literary analysis and transform it into a responsive, sophisticated, magical genre of writing that we can teach our students to develop and to adore. Using this book will produce the writing that you and your students will cherish most - these are the pieces they will keep, the ones they will publish. Marchetti and O'Dell's work brings relevance, voice, and life to a form that feels crusty and brittle with directions, templates and redundancy. This book will make your students better writers - but it will also help them to enter into the world they encounter with greater passion and insight than ever before."-Kate Roberts, author of A Novel Approach and coauthor of Falling in Love With Close Reading

"As tour guides to a brave new world, Rebekah O'Dell and Allison Marchetti reject the well-worn path of literary analysis and guide teachers to a vibrant new analytical landscape. By reframing the idea of text as anything that has a beginning, middle, and end, O'Dell and Marchetti entertain a "bigger vision for analysis," that helps students find their passion, explore their ideas, assert authority, and build solid structures for writing. Divided into three sections, the book offers an inquiry into traditional analysis, a compendium of practical lessons, and an exploration of sub-genres, such as writing about movies, music, sports, and video games. In addition, this book is chock full of dynamic mentor texts and classroom-ready techniques that will free your students to explore the vistas vital to their lives."-Liz Prather, author of Project-Based Writing

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This book is for teachers who want to revive the art of analytical writing in their classrooms-from teachers of middle-grade writers to teachers of experienced twelfth-grade writers who are looking ahead to college. We invite you to explore your teaching of analytical writing from a new perspective.

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Back to Results

Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities

John Warner

An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing.

There seems to be widespread agreement that-when it comes to the writing skills of college students-we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write, John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong.

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and...

An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing.

There seems to be widespread agreement that-when it comes to the writing skills of college students-we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write, John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong.

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules-such as the five-paragraph essay-designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments.

In Why They Can't Write, Warner has crafted both a diagnosis for what ails us and a blueprint for fixing a broken system. Combining current knowledge of what works in teaching and learning with the most enduring philosophies of classical education, this book challenges readers to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of strong writers.

Reviews

That title sounds as if it will be a grumpy polemic, but it's actually an inspiring exploration of what learning to write could be, framed by an analysis of why it so often is soul-destroying for both students and their teachers.

Articulates a set of humanist values that could generate rich new classroom practices and, one hopes, encourage teachers, parents, and policymakers to rethink the whole idea of School and why it matters to a society. Warner is pragmatic, not programmatic, and hopeful without being naïve... I hope teachers, parents, and administrators across the United States read his trenchant book. We are the reformers we have been waiting for.

Why They Can't Write dissects the underlying causes of why so much writing instruction fails in the American system and it provides tested, practical solutions for doing better. The book is more than a how-to-teach guide, however. It diagnoses several important structural problems in American education, including standardized testing, the allure of educational fads, the abuses of technology-driven solutions, and cruel working conditions for teachers.

I wanted direction on how to better teach writing, and I got it-sample assignments that I can tweak to fit my classroom and discipline in marvelous ways. But I got so much more. I closed the book feeling energized and motivated to go back to the classroom and make changes. In fact my first reaction, as I finished, was 'I have to go write about this!' Which so perfectly encapsulates so much of what John would like to see us do as learners that I couldn't help but laugh.

What is to blame for students' bad writing? According to Warner, the entire context in which it is taught. He rails against school systems that privilege shallow "achievement" over curiosity and learning, a culture of "surveillance and compliance" (including apps that track students' behaviour and report it to parents in real time), an obsession with standardized testing that is fundamentally inimical to thoughtful reading and writing, and a love of faddish psychological theories and worthless digital learning projects.

Read More

See All Reviews

Book Details

Part I: Introduction
Our Writing "Crisis"
Johnny Could Never Write
The Writer's Practice
The Five-Paragraph Essay
Part II: The Other Necessities
The Problem of Atmosphere
The Problem of Surveillance
The

Part I: Introduction
Our Writing "Crisis"
Johnny Could Never Write
The Writer's Practice
The Five-Paragraph Essay
Part II: The Other Necessities
The Problem of Atmosphere
The Problem of Surveillance
The Problem of Assessment and Standardization
The Problem of Educational Fads
The Problem of Technology Hype
The Problem of Folklore
The Problem of Precarity
Part III: A New Framework
Why School?
Increasing Rigor
The Writer's Practice
Making Writing Meaningful by Making Meaningful Writing
Writing Experiences
Increasing Challenges
Part IV: Unanswered Questions
What about Academics?
What about Grammar?
What about Grades?
What about the Children?
What about the Teachers?
In Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Index
About the Author

John Warner is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, a contributing blogger for Inside Higher Ed, and an editor at large for McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He is the author or coeditor of seven books, including The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing.

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Back to Results Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities John Warner An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing. There seems to be widespread agreement that-when it comes to the writing skills of college students-we are in the midst of a crisis.

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A Review of Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros

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A Review of Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros

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Colin Farrell Shines In Apple TV+’s Refined and Genre-Bending Sugar

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Colin Farrell Shines In Apple TV+’s Refined and Genre-Bending Sugar

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Bridgerton season three review – still unbearably sexy

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Bridgerton season three review – still unbearably sexy

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How Miles Morales Changed the Spider-Verse

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How Miles Morales Changed the Spider-Verse

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Girl on Fire Graphic Novel by Alicia Keys - Lolo is our kind of hero!

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Girl on Fire Graphic Novel by Alicia Keys - Lolo is our kind of hero!

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In August 2020, Kate Wilson, a 16-year-old from Shrewsbury, posted on the social media video platform TikTok a series of quotes from books she had read, "that say I love you, without actually saying I love you". Set to a melancholy soundtrack, the short video plays out as Wilson, an A-level student, holds up copies of the books with the quotes superimposed over them. "You have been the last dream of my soul," from A Tale of Two Cities. "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same," from Wuthering Heights. "Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own," from . It has been viewed more than 1.2m times.

Wilson's TikTok handle, @kateslibrary, is among the increasingly popular accounts posting on #BookTok, a corner of TikTok devoted to reading, which has clocked up 9.6bn views and counting, and has been described as the last wholesome place on the internet. Here, users - predominantly young women - post short videos inspired by the books they love. Those that do best are fun, snappy takes on literature and the experience of reading. "Books where the main character was sent to kill someone but they end up falling in love," from @kateslibrary. "Things that bookworms do," from @abbysbooks. "When you were 12 and your parents caught you crying over a book," from @emilymiahreads.

The way users are creating imagery inspired by what they are reading is so simple, and so clever

Kat McKenna, marketing and brand consultant

These posts can attract millions of views, and rekindle an appreciation of books in young readers. "I started reading again after six years when I came across BookTok for the first time last October," says Mireille Lee, 15, who, with her 13-year-old sister Elodie, now runs the high-profile @alifeofliterature account on TikTok.

The idea started after Mireille convinced her sister to try the young adult novel The Selection by Kiera Cass; "I didn't want to read. I was into gaming," Elodie says. But once she started, she couldn't put it down, and set up her own TikTok account, through which she shared videos inspired by the mood, or "aesthetic", of The Selection. When one of Elodie's videos received 1,000 likes in a day, Mireille decided to join her, and the sisters now have some 284,000 followers and 6m likes; one of their biggest hits was about E Lockhart's We Were Liars, which flashes photos of dramatic and glamorous scenes on a beautiful coastline, summing up the book's contents to thrilling music. As the sisters put it, it's about "convincing you to read books based on their aesthetics".

While this might sound like a reductive way to talk about books, the sisters know that these memes are an effective ruse to entice readers. "I think it all comes down to the fact that when you see a book, you're like: 'no more homework thank you very much.'" Mireille says. "I tried influencing my friends to pick up The Selection, or Red Queen [by Victoria Aveyard], and they were just not having it." Instead, "we showed them loads of images with some really popular music, and that was a huge success. People loved it, and we've continued doing it."

Adam Silvera's 2017 novel They Both Die at the End is one of the books to have benefited from the BookTok effect. Users recently started filming themselves before and after reading the book, sobbing as they reached the finish line. In March, it shot to the top of the teen fiction charts, selling more than 4,000 copies a week. The book has sold more than 200,000 copies in the UK, with well over half of those coming belatedly in 2021, after thousands of posts about it (#adamsilvera has been viewed 10.8m times).

Screengrabs from, left to right, @kateslibrary, @alifeofliterature and @emilymiahreads. Composite: TikTok

Publishers are watching with interest. "The pool of people who are guaranteed to buy young adult books is limited to a few thousand dedicated lovers of the genre, but BookTok is exciting, with its short, entertaining videos bringing a new, powerful opportunity to reach and engage non-readers, to create more book lovers," says Kat McKenna, a marketing and brand consultant specialising in children's and young adult books. "These 'snapshot' visual trailers are making books cinematic in a way that publishers have been trying to do with marketing book trailers for a really long time. But the way TikTok users are creating imagery inspired by what they are reading is so simple, and so clever. It's that thing of bringing the pages to life, showing what you get from a book beyond words."

At Simon & Schuster, marketing and publicity manager Olivia Horrox, who worked on Silvera's novel, is now watching another of her titles, Tracy Deonn's Legendborn, taking on a new life on BookTok. "It has become a trend that other users want to jump on and start creating their own content," she says. "Like the ice-bucket challenge that used to be around on Facebook, these TikTok trends become a challenge in the same way, and you don't want to miss out on the zeitgeist, so you get the book that everyone's talking about."

BookTokers capture the "visceral reaction" to a book, which doesn't come across in a written review, Horrox says. "There's something about the fact that it is under a minute. People who are consuming this content want stuff that's quicker and snappier all the time - you watch a 32-second video and someone's like: 'This book has LGBTQ romance, it's really heartbreaking, it's speculative fiction.' And then the viewers think: 'Oh, OK, those are all things that I'm interested in. I'll go buy it.'"

A teenager's emotional life can be rocky, soaring from intense highs to crashing lows, and books that offer a cathartic cry prove most popular. "Romantic books and sad books seem to be really big," McKenna says. "If it tugs at a heartstring, it's likely to retain the user's attention."

Ayman Chaudhary, who is 20 and at university in Chicago, found her likes soared when she posted a video of her response - loud (and hilarious) wailing - to finishing Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles. "There's this trend going around in which you talk about a book and maybe you even add a clip of you crying while reading the book," Chaudhary says. "It makes people curious - like, what could make this book so good, or so sad that it can make you show your emotions and be so vulnerable to the public? Books that can make me cry instantly have my money."

It's not all romance and tears, however. American teenager "ccolinnnn" has 21.7m likes for his humorous posts, which are often teasers for live streams in which he reads children's bedtime stories. Emily Russell, who has 1.2m likes for her @emilymiahreads account, found it took off in earnest after a post about a bookshop that she loves going to. And some of the funniest videos mock literary tropes - "How white people write east asian women", or "which dress are you wearing to run romantically through a castle to your lover?", or "what I think I look like when I'm reading, versus what I actually look like".

Chaudhary says it was during lockdown that she started posting BookTok videos, spurred on by "quarantine boredom. I never planned to make content. I didn't think I had anything special or new to say." Today, she has 258,000 followers and 16.2m likes for her @aymansbooks account.

Wilson, too, got into BookTok during lockdown. "I just love finding even more people who I can talk with about my favourite books," she says. "I've actually had a few people at my school who I'd never spoken to before come up to me just to talk about books and my TikTok account because they'd found it." By December 2020, she was being contacted regularly by publishers, who had realised that TikTok "really does sell books".

Russell, a 21-year-old science student, first started to get sent books by publishers and authors at the end of September. "I still can't believe that I get to work with these publishing houses. It's always been a dream of mine," she says.

BookTok content tends to focus around the five or so "hot" books, which currently include the fantasy novels Caraval by Stephanie Garber, Heartless by Marissa Mayer and Sarah J Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses series. "What people really love on Booktok is fantasy romance. If you tell someone that there's a romance when they try to kill each other, that's it, sold," says Faith Young, who posts as @hellyeahbooks.

"At the beginning, when you first join, there are definitely six to 10 books that everyone speaks about," she says. "The more popular books tend to be quite straight and quite white. And so I think the biggest movement within the community is being like: 'Hey, have you never seen yourself represented? Here are books that are going to represent you.' I'm bisexual, and when I first joined, I only ever read books about straight couples. So finding these books that I saw myself reflected in was life-changing." She cites in particular Claire Legrand's Empirium trilogy, some of the first books she read with a bisexual protagonist.

Young is 22, and says: "I thought TikTok was ridiculous, last year before the first lockdown. I really did think it was just for 14-year-olds, but BookTok is such a lovely community. These are people who like the same books as me, and I can talk about the books that I like. It just seems a little bit magical."

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The rise of BookTok: meet the teen influencers pushing books up the charts

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Young Tiktok users are sharing their passion for books with millions - bringing titles they love to life online and reshaping the publishing world, all in under a minute

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Doctoral dissertation in graphic novel form | Boing Boing

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Columbia University awarded a doctorate in education to Nick Sousanis for Unflattening, a graphic novel about the relationship between words and pictures in literature.

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Building Authority through Active Research

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Building Authority through Active Research

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Building Authority through Active Research

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Connecting Writing Process & The Writing Rope

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Connecting Writing Process & The Writing Rope

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Zaretta Hammond