I have to write my Library Journal review tonight so I thought I would provide something for your amusement. I have been hanging on to this photo for months waiting for a good time to post it. I don’t remember where it came from, a library newsletter I think. It cracks me up, especially given my regular garden battles with squirrels. Enjoy!
Add a Comment
Tomorrow is the big plant sale and I have plants and gardening on the brain and can’t think about books right now. So instead I give you Downton Wars: Episode 1 The Phantom Valet (via Boing Boing)
Add a Comment
I tried to get the cats to help me pick a name but when they saw there were no treats in the bowl I put down on the floor they turned up their noses and walked away so I had to take care of pulling out a name myself. I would have thought a bit more gratitude on the part of Waldo and Dickens would have been in order seeing as how they have such a great new box. But that’s cats for you.
So who won?
Jeane! who also blogs at Dogear Diary.
Congratulations Jeane!
Thanks everyone for your comments. I wish all of you could get a lamp but maybe Santa will bring one to your house this year with a big pile of books too. Because I know we have all been good, but even if we haven’t we still all deserve a good lamp and a pile of books!
Add a Comment
I would so live in this house! It’s only 557 square feet but it is wall-to-wall shelves that can support ten tons of books. I’d need a ladder or a monkey to reach those high up shelves though. All those shelves also make perfect cat sleeping nooks. A bookworm’s dream house!
Thanks to my sister for sending me the link!
Add a Comment
Darn that Chronicle of Higher Education for making the article I wanted to link available to subscribers only! For those of you who have access to the magazine either online or off, the article is in the current issue and is called Modify This. It is about a class at Trinity College on diagraming sentences. The professor is teaching the class because students asked her to. Can you believe it? And the students love it.
Did you ever have to diagram sentences when you were in school? I never did in high school. In fact my teachers commented on skipping that part of the grammar book that there was no need to learn it because it was useless. A few years later I found myself majoring in English and having to take an upper level class in grammar. An entire semester of nothing but grammar. And what did we have to do? Diagram sentences! The teacher assumed everyone knew how and from my perspective it appeared that 3/4 of the class did know how. Those of us who didn’t had to frantically read everything we could in the textbook and figure it out as best we could.
Oh that class was a nightmare. But the Trinity College class sounds like it would be fun. They start off with easy sentences and build up to complex ones, their final assignment for the class asks them to diagram 120 lines of their favorite poem. The class also thrives on a little competition. At the end the 30 students are broken up into two teams. Each team has a week or two to write a sentence for the other team. Then on competition day the sentences are exchanged, the stop watch starts ticking and they have something like 40 minutes to diagram the sentence. The teams work at the same time each on their own blackboard. Each team starts off with 100 points and get deductions for errors. The team with the most points after deductions wins.
I admit sentence diagraming has a certain appeal to it. There is something precise and mathematical about it that makes it satisfying. But when your teacher is, like mine was, a grammar Nazi, then it is no fun.
When I hear about classes like the one at Trinity, I sometimes wish I could go back and have a “do-over,” trade the class I took and my memories of it for this better class. Lacking a time machine, I guess I will have to settle for using my imagination while reading Chronicle articles.
Posted in Miscellaneus
