Lost But Now Found

On September 15, 2020, Dan Martin (a professor at Central Washington University) ironically tweeted that “Academia is reading a book & then forgetting that book ever existed.  Regardless of what prompted this tweet, I’m guessing that most CRWP blog readers (myself included) would tend to disagree.  Nevertheless, I have recently been writing a reading memoir, […]

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Passions Are Powerful Conductors of the Future

After a tumultuous semester battling pneumonia and the recurrence of my mother’s cancerous tumor, I packed up my Hope College memorabilia and returned to my hometown, parental rules, and the familiar pink shag carpet my eleven-year-old self had loved.  I wasn’t really  bitter about my homecoming, as one might think. I was plagued with confusion: […]

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In Defense of Audio Books

My students didn’t consider themselves readers until I began using audiobooks.  Before audiobooks, nothing was more difficult for my students than sitting down with a book and trying to make the letters into words and the words into sentences that meant something to them.  All of my students have disabilities and many are bilingual (but […]

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Naming the Elephant: An Announcement

In celebration of their union, “Close Reading” and “Critical Reading” will now be addressed as simply “Critical Reading.” Please update your planbook accordingly. In my first post of this series, I discussed and defined a problem that I see: that my colleagues and I are all using the term “Close Reading,” but we all have […]

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What Experts Say About the Elephant: What is Close Reading? And why do we do it?

In my first post of this series, I unpacked the problem I saw with the term “Close Reading.” This buzzword seems to have many different interpretations. Everyone I’ve talked with is “doing Close Reading” with our students, but none of us is doing the same thing. I need to get to the bottom of this […]

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