Nancy Flanagan, retired teacher in Michigan, wonders why the extremist Moms for Liberty have jumped into the reading wars on the side of the “Science of Reading.” The politicization of reading is not new. Phonics has long been a rightwing cause, unfairly, in my view. Every reading teacher should know how to teach phonics.

What’s new is the idea that only phonics can be considered “the science of reading.” This conceit was hatched by the National Reading Panel in 2000. The new Bush administration was super pro-phonics and inserted a $6 billion phonics program called Reading First into No Chikd Left Behind. After six years, Reading First was abandoned because it was riddled with conflicts of interest and self-dealing, and an extensive evaluation concluded that it didn’t make a difference.

Flanagan is especially interested in reading instruction in middle school.

She begins:

I am fascinated by the increasing politicization—no other…

When we talk about academic writing, as usually refer to papers, books, chapters and dissertations. However, there’s a lot more to academic writing than just these four. Even if these are the most high stakes quartet going, there’s still more. A lot more.

This post is simply a list of the most common kinds of writing types that you will come across which all count as academic writing.

Caveats. This is not an exhaustive list. Texts which appear in one group below may equally work in another. Texts are not simply words on a page, but are variously multimodal, digital and hard copy. Some texts serve more than one purpose.

So with that in mind, here goes.

Texts that report academic work written primarily for other academics – and wehich m ay be audited:

Credit: Freepik

I like bwat — books with a twist. And short stories with unexpected endings. The element of surprise is a great thing, plus it’s fun to think back to the start and middle of the novel or briefer tale to see what might have telegraphed the twist.

Some VERY famous short stories with shockingly not-foreseen conclusions? Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (first published in The New Yorker just over 75 years ago), Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace,” Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek,” and of course various O. Henry tales — including “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Last Leaf.”

Many mystery novels obviously also have unpredictable endings, as the authors use misdirection and red herrings to try to make you think someone other than the actual culprit did the murder(s). Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, anyone?

Archie Shepp: “On November 1st, the Detroit Artist’s Workshop, now defunct, celebrated its tenth anniversary . Not exactly an earth-shattering event, this anniversary, but one with great significance for those of us whose daily cultural practice sterns largely from that which developed during the post -beat. pre-hippie days of the early 1960s. Back before the 1967 Summer of Love/mass cultural explosion, which forever changed the face of this nation, there were only a few meccas of alternative consciousness in the midst of Ike Easyhower America. Most EVERYBODY back then was straight, immersed in the P.R. of Bob Hope and JFK, using Brylcreem, and certain that what was good for General Motors was good for the USA. Being a freek back then was REALLY being an oddity, the object of mixed amusement, scorn and often dangerous hostility. There weren’t any gathering places for those like yourself, you couldn’t cop marijuana in…

Todd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria write here about a school board in Pennsylvania that hired a pricey consultant to improve the district’s curriculum. The consultant had scant experience in his field, but that is no barrier these days to telling teachers what to teach. He did have one important credential: he was a graduate of Hillsdale College, the bastion of Christian conservatism in education. The article appears on the blog Popular Information. Please open the link to read the full post.

They begin:

On June 20, educational consultant Jordan Adams delivered a much-anticipated presentation to the Pennridge School Board, revealing his recommended changes to the Eastern Pennsylvania school district’s social studies curriculum. Adams, the founder of Vermilion Education, appeared via Zoom. The curriculum experts who work for the district recommended that first grade social studies focus on “Rules and Responsibilities,” “Geography,” and “Important People and Places.” Adams instead proposed that…

Like other Republican dominated states, Georgia passed copycat legislation banning the teaching of “divisive concepts” that might make some students feel uncomfortable or ashamed of something that happened long ago (like slavery, Jim Crow laws, peonage, segregation, etc., all of which is factual and true).

Despite the fact that the law was designed to deter teachers from accurately teaching about racism, a fifth-grade teacher is fighting for her job because she assigned a book about gender.

Anyone who wants to understand why teachers are leaving and teacher shortages are widespread should read this story.

At first glance, the plight of Katherine Rinderle, a fifth-grade teacher in Georgia, might seem confusing. Rinderle faces likely termination by the Cobb County School District for reading aloud a children’s book that touches on gender identity. Yet she is charged in part with violating policy related to a state law banning “divisive concepts” about race…

“It’s an instantly recognisable image: Bob Dylan, in all his mid-1960s psychedelic glory, standing outside a New York brownstone. A checkerboard scarf dangles from his neck. An inscrutable look comes across his face. If you’ve ever spent hours pouring over the double-album majesty of Dylan’s 1966 LP Blonde on Blonde, you know exactly what this image looks like. But if you ever thought that something was slightly askew about the image, you’re not wrong. A close look at the front cover shows that Dylan is slightly out of focus on the cover. It’s part of the mystique of the album – was Dylan purposefully trying to tell us something about himself with the blurry photo? Was it a comment on his famously obfuscated lyrics? Maybe he was starting to slowly resent the spotlight that captured his every detail. Could it be a reference to a drug trip? As…

“Sitting at a big wooden table at Ken Ruzicka’s home on a cold November morning in Fire Island Pines, the 79-year-old artist and landscape designer is telling me how he acquired the table. We’re surrounded by space heaters, which keep the one-story cottage warm, and his own artwork, accumulated from more than 40 years of painting; a smell of summer mold hovers in my nose as Ruzicka explains that the table comes from famed furniture designer and friend David Ebner, for whom he made a garden in exchange for the table many years ago. Ruzicka is a natural storyteller, but he knows why I’m here. In art and literary lore, he’s known for being the driver that hit poet Frank O’Hara near Crown Walk by the Pines on July 24, 1966. O’Hara, then known more as an art curator at the Museum of Modern Art, also wrote and published…

“Leaf Storm is the common translation for Gabriel García Márquez‘s novellaLa Hojarasca. First published in 1955, it took seven years to find a publisher. Widely celebrated as the first appearance of Macondo, the fictitious village later made famous in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Leaf Storm is a testing ground for many of the themes and characters later immortalized in said book. It is also the title of a short story collection by García Márquez. … The narrative of Leaf Storm shifts between the perspectives of three generations of one family as the three characters (father, daughter and grandson respectively) find themselves in a spiritual limbo after the death of a man passionately hated by the entire village yet inextricably linked to the patriarch of the family. The novella takes place in Macondo, the fictional town that would be the future site of more…