We were having supper with friends recently, and somehow the conversation came around to Shakespeare and the news that a number of American universities have dropped the Bard entirely from their lists of required courses for English majors. And the question was asked, “Why should Shakespeare be required reading for English majors in this age of tweeting and texting and unedited garbage topping the bestseller lists and the English language disintegrating faster than the earth is warming?
Posts tagged as “essays”
Charles Mallory Hatfield was certainly the most successful person to practice the art of pluviculture, or artificial rainmaking. Born in Kansas but raised in southern California, Hatfield first gained broad public acclaim when, in 1904, he climbed to the top of Mt. Lowe and released a secret mixture of chemicals into the air.
Last autumn, I received permission to harvest apples from our neighbor’s tree. I had no idea what variety they were; they looked a bit like Gravensteins, but ripened later and were not very good eaten…
Actually, I was not a computer professor but a junior college part-time computer instructor in the late 1980s at Evergreen Valley Community College in San Jose. I bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1979 when…
In 1967, when I was a senior in high school and intending to grow up to be a star of stage and screen, I landed one of the leads in the Woodside High production of the not-so-great musical Take Me Along, based on Eugene O’Neil’s play Ah, Wilderness.
We arrived in Stockton in my car of the moment, a '58 Plymouth Fury, a cool car in its day, a sporty two-door hardtop with outsized Cadillac-style rear fins. It had two big 4-barrel carburetors sitting opposite each other on a ram-induction fuel system feeding a huge “hemi” V-8 engine and a speedometer that registered up to 160 miles per hour.
Exactly one week before Christmas I received a bill in the mail from the Mendocino Coast District Hospital for $2,635.47. Immediately after arriving home from the post office, I called the hospital’s billing department. I spoke at some length to two women who worked there.
High school hit me right between the eyes. Where does a freshman fit in? At the bottom of the ladder, of course. Within a student body of well over a thousand individuals, I ran smack into a social class mentality that seemed to pervade the entire experience, the elite spending their time looking down their noses at those beneath them, each class assuming a position of authority over the underclasses.