Staying Alive: Mary Oliver on How Books Saved Her and Why Passion for Work Is the Antidote to Sorrow
“The world’s otherness is antidote to confusion [and] standing within this otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.”
By: Langston Hughes
Mister rich man, rich man,
Open up your heart and mind.
Mister rich man, rich man,
Open up your heart and mind.
Give the poor man a chance,
Help stop these hard, hard times.
Toni Morrison was an American novelist from Ohio. In 1998 she earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her work Beloved (1987), and in 1993 became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.[3] She died on 5 August 2019, when the HuffPost, wrote that the "world lost one of its most important voices"
The Wrong Way to Teach Grammar
No more diagramming sentences: Students learn more from simply writing and reading.
A century of research shows that traditional grammar lessons—those hours spent diagramming sentences and memorizing parts of speech—don’t help and may even hinder students’ efforts to become better writers. Yes, they need to learn grammar, but the old-fashioned way does not work.
This finding—confirmed in 1984, 2007, and 2012 through reviews of over 250 studies—is consistent among students of all ages, from elementary school through college. For example, one well-regarded study followed three groups of students from 9th to 11th grade where one group had traditional rule-bound lessons, a second received an alternative approach to grammar instruction, and a third received no grammar lessons at all, just more literature and creative writing. The result: No significant differences among the three groups—except that both grammar groups emerged with a strong antipathy to English.
