National English Honor Society (NEHS) is on social media and we’re waiting for you! Over the past year NEHS social media has stepped up its game. In addition to our existing Facebook and Twitter accounts, we have joined forces with our sponsoring organization, Sigma Tau Delta, to create joint accounts under the name EnglishMatters across several new social media platforms, including Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest. Just find and follow us on the platforms you currently use for updates on society news. NEHS social media also posts about hot topics in the field of English such as STEAM, college admissions/college transition, EdTech, careers for English majors, pedagogy, grammar, and English humor. If you aren’t following NEHS social media yet, here is a sampling of some of the great content you have been missing:
What Can I Do with an English Major
“The story of the unemployable English major is both powerful and damaging, since students are more than ever concerned that their choice of degree will lead to successful employment—reasonably so considering the lingering effects of the recession and the high cost of postsecondary education in the US. Hence it behooves us to counter the belief that English majors can’t get a job.” Keep reading
The View from Hemingway’s Attic: Political Correctness in Novels
“I was reading Chad Harbach’s novel The Art of Fielding and cruising along and then I just stopped. I had tripped over a word and at first I thought it was a typo, something that slipped through the proof reader if there is such a person anymore. But then I realized the word was intentional and that the novel had fallen victim to the dictates of political correctness.” Keep reading
The Decline and Fall of the English Major
“In the past few years, I’ve taught nonfiction writing to undergraduates and graduate students at Harvard, Yale, Bard, Pomona, Sarah Lawrence and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Each semester I hope, and fear, that I will have nothing to teach my students because they already know how to write. And each semester I discover, again, that they don’t.” Keep reading
English Teacher’s Hip-Hop Curriculum Gets Students Writing
“With new academic standards ratcheting up literacy expectations, many teachers are looking for ways to engage students more deeply in writing and reading assignments.
Lauren Leigh Kelly, an English teacher at Half Hollow Hills High School West in Dix Hills, NY, and an adjunct English instructor at Teachers College, Columbia University, has found that incorporating rap and hip-hop culture into the literacy curriculum can help connect instruction to students’ individual backgrounds and foster their interest in writing.” Keep reading
Want to Write Better? Read Better Writing.
“Reading is a critical skill taught in elementary and secondary school. As children, we start with the ABCs and work up to classics such as Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God.’ After graduation, however, many individuals stop thinking about the importance of what they read. Yet the quality of what one reads directly affects the complexity of his or her writing, according to a new study in the International Journal of Business Administration.” Keep reading
Study Finds Allowing Devices in Classrooms Hurts Academic Performance
“When faculty members at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point took away students’ computers and tablets in an introductory economics courses, their students’ grades jumped.” Keep reading
To Write Better Code, Read Virginia Woolf
“The humanities are kaput. Sorry, liberal arts cap-and-gowners. You blew it. In a software-run world, what’s wanted are more engineers. At least, so goes the argument in a rising number of states, which have embraced a funding model for higher education that uses tuition ‘bonuses’ to favor hard-skilled degrees like computer science over the humanities. The trend is backed by countless think pieces. ‘Macbeth does not make my priority list,’ wrote Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the author of a widely shared blog post titled ‘Is Majoring in Liberal Arts a Mistake for Students?’” Keep reading
I Would Rather do Anything Else Than Grade Your Final Papers
“Dear Students Who Have Just Completed My Class, I would rather do anything else than grade your Final Papers. I would rather base jump off of the parking garage next to the student activity center or eat that entire sketchy tray of taco meat leftover from last week’s student achievement luncheon that’s sitting in the department refrigerator or walk all the way from my house to the airport on my hands than grade your Final Papers.” Keep reading
STEAM: The “A” Stands for the Arts
“Last week I wrote a post about STEM . . . how the emphasis in public education is on science, technology, engineering, and math . . . as being the appropriate preparation for today’s jobs. I do not disagree that these fields are where the jobs are. I do, however, think that the ability to communicate clearly is still important, as is the role of the arts in a well-rounded education.” Keep reading
An E-Book UI That Lets You Flip Digital Pages, Just Like a Real Book
“If a book is good, you should be so immersed in it that you don’t care how far you’ve read or how much further there is to go. Does that sound like a good rationalization for the generally terrible navigation schemes that we put up with in our e-books? I love my Kindle, but using percentages instead of page numbers makes me feel like I’m reading a calculator instead of a book.” Keep reading
#Yodify your Grammar
“With the arrival of the anniversary of the initial release of the first Star Wars movie, we at Grammarly started to reflect on what makes the films so great. Being language lovers and word nerds at heart, we are particularly fascinated and charmed by the grammar of the great Jedi master, Yoda. To celebrate our love of Star Wars, we dissected a few classic Yoda-style quotes in order to better understand the patterns that #yodify the English language.” Keep reading
NEHS Social Media
