Tag Archives: Education

Dealing with Painful Critiques

Posted on October 19, 2025 by knlistman

Educators often do not recognize their most creative students. I witnessed examples of this behavior as teachers described which poems they preferred in an anthology written by students. The cheerful rhyming poems were often considered better than those dealing with … Continue reading →

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Are You What You Read?

Posted on March 28, 2025 by knlistman

We don’t seem to be recovering from the drop in literacy within the United States among school age children in 2019 and following years. The standard response is blame the problem on children not receiving an adequate education during the … Continue reading →

Posted in Characters, Emotional intelligence, Literature, Trends in books | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

What’s the Big Deal about Readability?

Posted on July 5, 2024 by knlistman

Today, writers rarely use semicolons, which provide a level of pause between a comma and a period. Authors have declared war on adverbs, forms of the verb to be, or filter words that identify a character’s thoughts. Others want to … Continue reading →

Posted in Fiction in education, Novels, romance, Writing trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

How long before they move out?

Posted on September 28, 2016 by knlistman

The trend that many talk about is how millennials are remaining with their families longer. According to a recent Pew Report “In 2014, for the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more … Continue reading →

Posted in Generational differences | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

The lesson of the limes

Posted on October 17, 2013 by knlistman

“I’m so degraded, I owe at least a dozen limes.” Amy confesses. She is basically in a pickle, or perhaps more correctly out of pickles, pickled limes that is. She is deep into the fad of bringing limes to school … Continue reading →

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Write about writing

Posted on September 5, 2013 by knlistman

When students face the task of writing for state mandated tests, there are always a few that want to vent their spleen by describing how much they hate to do this kind of writing. The hapless scorer must read through … Continue reading →

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Hiding the truth in plain sight

Posted on August 16, 2013 by knlistman

  “I don’t get it. It just about a bunch of animals, but the pigs are mean.” I still cringe when I hear students make comments like this. My own children were introduced to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, when they were … Continue reading →

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Defining the portfolio

Posted on July 31, 2013 by knlistman

Do you regret the time lost with state mandated assessments? What if the products being assessed were actually part of the learning experience. That is one of the ideas behind the move to assess students through their portfolios. However, before … Continue reading →

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The case for the case

Posted on July 29, 2013 by knlistman

Portfolio – a portable case for holding papers – a simple name for a collection of works into which a person has poured hours of deliberation and sweat. Today the portfolio is just as likely to be stored on a … Continue reading →

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Too rigorous for creativity

Posted on July 26, 2013 by knlistman

A teacher voiced his frustration about getting gifted students past the hurdle of simply looking at events of a story to the uncover the devices that the author used in writing the story.  The students need to interpret the effect … Continue reading →

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