Roll reversals! When you eat a roll from the bottom up. Actually, my topic this week is ROLE reversals…in literature.

There’s plenty of potential drama in those reversals — including how the protagonists act in the unexpected/unfamiliar situations they find themselves in, and how other people react to those characters.

Perhaps the best known example of a role reversal in fiction is Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, whose two main characters dizzyingly switch stations in life. But role reversals can be more realistic and recognizable.

In a novel I recently read — Kristin Hannah’s heart-wrenching, masterful Home Front — Jolene is deployed as a helicopter pilot in the Iraq War while her attorney husband Michael remains on the…home front…to take care of their two daughters. A somewhat unusual gender reversal. Of course, many women are now in the military, but the novel is set nearly 20 years…

In everyday speech, a discussion is usually understood as an in depth treatment of a topic, a way to exchange ideas or a process of talking about something in order to reach a decision. An academic discussion in a thesis or paper has elements of each of these three possibilities – an academic discussion is you

• working further on your empirical material (in depth)
• putting your ideas into conversation with the existing literatures (exchange) and
• reaching a conclusion ( deciding on your “answers’ to your question or hypothesis).

However by the time PhDers come to the discussion chapter they are often tired. They’ve done a load of work generating and analysing stuff – and they have results. So why do more? Isn’t this enough already? Do you really have to start all over again?

It’s not really surprising that discussion chapters can have one or more of five predictable problems:

1966 “John Wieners (January 6, 1934 – March 1, 2002) was a Beat poet and member of the San Francisco Renaissance; an antiwar and gay rights activist. His poetry combined candid accounts of sexual and drug-related experimentation with jazz-influenced improvisation.”

“John Wieners once wrote, ‘I will be an old man sometime / And live in a dark room somewhere.’ Today Wieners is an old man, but his small apartment on the far side of Beacon Hill — on Joy Street, where he has lived since 1971 — is not dark. It is bright and disorderly and crowded with visual evidence of a mind constantly shuffling perceptions: a kind of four-room, lived-in collage. One of his own books, an out-of-print paperback, lies open on a Formica-topped table, spine broken, lines of poetry crossed out and rewritten in pencil as if the literary choices he made 40 years ago still gnaw at…

“The Prairie Fire Organizing Committee is an activist group whose members advocate the overthrow of the current capitalist system as the only solution to racism, sexism, homophobia, classism and imperialism. … The Prairie Fire Organization began in 1975. It sprang up from the radical group known as Weatherman. Members of the group, Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn (a pseudonym for several individuals who were unnamed), created a six-part book titled Prairie Fire:The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism (1974), composed of sections titled, ‘Arm the Spirit,’ ‘Vietnam,’ ‘On the Road: Impressions of US History,’ ‘Imperialism in Crisis: The Third World,’ ‘Imperialism in Crisis: The Home Front,’ and ‘Against the Common Enemy’. The book’s preparation was a 12-month process, written collaboratively and adopted as the collective statement of the Weather Underground. Mark Rudd stated that the book ‘was an attempt to influence the movement that…

Louise Glück born on April 22, 1943, in New York City and grew up on Long Island; American poet and essayist; winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Wild Iris; Library of Congress Special Bicentennial Consultant (2000-2002) and Poet Laureate (2003-2004); and 2014 National Book Award (Poetry) for Faithful and Virtuous Night. In 2020, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her father was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who helped invent and market the X-Acto Knife. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University without graduating from either school. In her mid-twenties, she published her poetry collection Firstborn to mixed reviews. Glück has since published over a dozen collections which have been heaped with honors.

To read Louise Glück’s poem “Nostos” click:

“Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard had a hard time finding a publisher but was well-known by the time Luchino Visconti began working on his film of the same name. The book appeared in Italy in 1958 and was subsequently translated into many languages—a German version can be seen lying around in Visconti’s section of the four-part film Boccaccio ’70, released in 1962 (the other episodes were directed by Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, and Mario Monicelli). Gradually, the fortunes of the two works became entwined, so that they now seem commentaries on each other in different mediums, rather than the source for a film and the adaptation of a novel. Many have remarked on the affinities between Lampedusa and Visconti, with their aristocratic interest in fading splendor and dying worlds, and there is no doubt that the film is intimately faithful to the spirit of the novel—even when it shifts…

As Ron DeSantis and his compliant legislature tightens their control of tenure and academic freedom in the state’s public universities, many of the faculty at the private University of Miami have joined to protest the attack on their colleagues.

It has long been said that the states are “laboratories of democracy.” If you wonder why I post so much about Florida, it is because it has become a “laboratory of fascism,” where the state’s leadership is intent on controlling thought and expression, research and study.

Nearly 1,000 faculty, staff and students at the University of Miami have signed an open letter opposing a state bill moving through the Florida Legislature that they say is an “unprecedented attempt to exert political control over free thought and professional expertise in higher education.”

As a private university, UM isn’t funded or governed by the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees the 12 public…

“There’s little argument that the quintet Miles Davis led between 1965 and 1968 was one of the classic combos in the history of jazz. By teaming with the adventurous young musicians Wayne Shorter (tenor sax), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums), Davis pushed mainstream jazz toward the avant-garde, expanding on the modal jazz he inaugurated with ‘Kind of Blue’ and laid the groundwork for fusion. Four of their five studio albums – ‘ESP’, ‘Miles Smiles’, ‘Sorcerer’, ‘Nefertiti’ – were essential, and even when they were slightly off the mark, as on ‘Miles in the Sky’, they were still filled with provocative sounds and ideas. That’s the reason why ‘The Miles Davis Quintet 1965-68: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings’ is an essential release. It contains all the music from each of the five studio records, plus half of the material released on ‘Filles De Kilimanjaro’ and ‘Water…

Teaching Students to Care for the Earth

Every year, we celebrate Earth day during the month of April. To help teach students about why and how to care for our planet, here are some great resources from My Teaching Library…

A Study of the Earth – Natural Resources- This is a FREE resource shared from the Minerals Education Coalition.

Earth Day Activities for 2nd – 4th Grades- This Earth Day product includes a large number of activities for 2nd, 3rd and 4th grades for Language Arts and Science! It includes:
– A COMPLETE Lapbooking unit
– A VARIETY of Language arts activities including vocabulary work (Earth, recycle, reuse, reduce, conserve, resources, water, land, air, awareness, environment, clean, responsible, renewable, energy, natural) ; Mini-Books to create ; Reading comprehension ; Earth Day similes ; Poetry creation and more!
– Science Activities such as materials categorizing and sorting
– Answer…