Category Archives: School

School is Almost Upon Us

8/24/2010 – 10:56 am

And summer has nearly evaporated. Summers always promise much fun and usually they deliver, but not without the added stress of having something planned most weekends, the routine of packing and unpacking, and squeezing the daily grind into five days instead of seven. All of this is compounded with a baby too. I’m looking forward [...]

By Trent | Also posted in Gaming, Teaching | Comments (0)

More Reading, More CW Pedagogy, More Gaming

8/10/2010 – 2:06 pm

Reading upon reading upon reading on creative writing pedagogy and gaming. I’ve got at least three decent paper ideas that I should start writing any day now (one on creative writing pedagogy in the digital age, one on role-playing games and CW, and one on video games and CW) and there are plenty more bubbling [...]

By Trent | Also posted in Gaming, Reading, Teaching | Comments (2)

Things I Have Been Doing That Aren’t Blogging

7/29/2010 – 11:33 am

It’s funny: with the World Cup over and the limericks drying up, I’ve hardly visited this space in almost three weeks. Considering that I’m the author of this blog, I should probably remedy that. But baby-watching takes up a lot of time and I’ve been busy with other pursuits. In order, they are: Reading. Very [...]

By Trent | Also posted in Reading, Teaching | Comments (2)

Return After Four-Week Hiatus

5/10/2010 – 12:00 pm

/ Almost a month to the day since I last posted here but that doesn’t mean I’ve been idle. Two weeks ago over the weekend I took the written portion of my preliminary exam—36 pages written in 72 hours on three subject areas—and just last Thursday I did the oral portion—answering questions about those essays [...]

By Trent | Also posted in * Footie | Comments (2)

The Five Stages of Prelim Preparation

4/6/2010 – 10:05 am

Eerily similar and only slightly modified from this. 1. Denial – “I feel fine.”; “This can’t be happening, not to me.” Denial is usually only a temporary defense for the graduate student. This feeling is generally replaced with heightened awareness of situations and individuals that will be left behind after prelims. 2. Anger – “Why [...]

By Trent | Comments (2)

The Taking-A-Break Post

3/25/2010 – 3:28 pm

Major League Soccer kicks off tonight! Check it out tonight at 8:30 CT on ESPN2. Last year’s expansion success story the Seattle Sounders take on this year’s new boys, the Philadelphia Union. Will it be any good? Only one way to find out. This morning I finished a draft of my questions for my prelim [...]

By Trent | Also posted in * Footie, - US/MLS, Movies/TV | Comments (0)

The Neglected Blog and a Great 72 Hours for Spurs

3/24/2010 – 9:50 pm

/ So the reading continues in prep for my exam at the end of April. I switched gears away from my minor area of digital pedagogy and to my main area entitled “Unstable Realities: Magical Realism, Science Fiction, and the Fantastic in Postmodern World Literature.” The titles I’ve knocked down are Rhetorics of Fantasy by [...]

By Trent | Also posted in * Footie, - England/EPL, - Spain/La Liga, - US/MLS, Gaming, Reading, Teaching | Comments (0)

Blowing Out the Corneas

3/9/2010 – 2:05 pm

/ Right, so I’m taking a brief moment during a baby nap to post what I’ve been up to. Which is reading. Since my last post I’ve banged through two excellent collections published by the MacArthur Foundation for Digital Media and Learning, specifically The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning and Digital Youth, [...]

By Trent | Also posted in * Footie, - England/EPL, - Spain/La Liga, Reading | Comments (0)

Reading and Thinking While Playing Fallout 3

2/26/2010 – 7:16 pm

I’m almost done with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four, which is his second novel that features Sherlock Holmes. I had a free trial for Audible and couldn’t find anything I really wanted (sadly), and I’ve been thinking about doing some detective/noir reading. I also wanted the most bang for the buck [...]

By Trent | Also posted in Gaming, Reading, Teaching | Comments (1)

Some Humuments

2/23/2010 – 11:24 am

/ As part of the poetry unit in my Intro to Creative Writing class we take a look at some examples of visual poetry. This includes some calligrams, some collage poetry, and Tom Phillips’ remarkable A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. Wikipedia gives a

By Trent | Also posted in Teaching | Comments (0)