We finished reading for the AP exam in Louisville on Saturday, and I’m home now. But before I left, I sat down with Jim Barkus, Chief AP Reader for Literature and Composition, and Professor of English at Baylor University, to ask a few questions.
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June 11, 2007
Weirdly for this time of year, I've been getting a lot of questions about job interview etiquette. Excerpts from two of the better ones:
June 9, 2007
Europe's worst university system -- and that's saying a lot -- has done it again. Ten senior academics at Panteion University in Athens have stolen almost eight million dollars in state funds over the last five years or so. They bought luxury goods with the money, which was intended to support academic programs at Panteion. What's striking about the coverage from Greece is that the harshness of the verdicts, rather than the enormity of the crime, has shocked people.
June 8, 2007
Some of you were curious if the man in the slideshow in my previous post is me. Alas, no.
June 8, 2007
A longtime reader writes:
June 7, 2007
Sometimes, when you've finished reading 56,000 exams, you have to take a break and go see a big concrete chicken and a wax dummy of Colonel
June 7, 2007
A new correspondent writes:
June 6, 2007
Everyone focuses on neurasthenic high school juniors desperate to get into good colleges, but let's shift for a moment to the professors awaiting them.Today's New York Times features exactly the sort of student I want to see in my classrooms at George Washington University. He's independent, odd, intellectually curious, and living a somewhat difficult life. I'm thrilled that our admissions committee saw what there was to see in him.
June 6, 2007
Here was my day, in a sentence: “The past of the character greatly contributes to the meaning of the novel as a whole.” Indeed. Many, many AP English Lit essays I graded today began with the same startling insight. Please pass the hemlock.
June 6, 2007
If I knew the literature well enough, I'd start developing a theory of academic gossip. As it is, I'm stuck at the level of observations.Over the past few months, some really provocative pieces of gossip have been flying around campus. (Happily, I haven't been the star of any of them.) I've heard the same (or closely related) rumors from multiple sources, each from a different angle. As a piece of anthropological fieldwork, it's kind of fun.
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