What else I think I know about writing...

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What "Ordinary Men" teaches about conditioning for mass murder

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is a book about a Hamburg-based police force's involvement in the mass killing of Jews during WWII. It is, in part, a historian's effort to understand how relatively "ordinary men" (conscripted into the war effort relatively late in the overall timeline) became willing participants in execution. "Willing" is perhaps not the right word, and in fact many did not participate on account of deep ideological values -- but the interviews on which the book is based do point to the variety of justifications and manipulations that made it possible for these ordinary men to become killers. Here's what I've learned so far: Collapse the distance between "police" and "military." Make killing legal. Create conditions of economic uncertainty. Create promotion ladders (or, alternately, threats against career promotion for non-participants) Make opportunities for "con...
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What I think I know about writing (pt I)

"there are no general recipes or designs that can be applied to all contexts, but certain principles and experiences that must be adjusted to the predominant theoretical and pedagogical traditions, to the profiles of instructors and students, and to the institutional resources and to the curricular spaces available." -- Federico Navarro, "Think Globally, Act Locally: How to Design an Academic Writing Course for Students Entering University," p. 112 (https://doi.org/10.37514/INT-B.2025.2739.2.04) as Rose and Martin (2012) point out, if students are not taught to read and write independently, educational institutions will only reproduce the underlying social and cultural inequalities of their students. (Navarro, p. 119) Writing encourages a slowing of thinking. That slowing down is good when it allows for inspection and growth. To the extent that a process approach encourages inspection, it is good for writers' development. A process approach that produces change ...
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FYW Curriculum Idea 1: Federal Program Impacts

 A motivating question: How can we get writers to move beyond ideology to explore, understand, and make decisions based on evidence? EXIGENCIES/ASSUMPTIONS Immediately (Spring 2025), DOGE is massively cutting federal funding for a variety of agencies and programs that have existed for decades or more.  Broadly speaking, citizens (of all ages) are getting "further from the facts," in terms of forming attitudes about civic behavior. There is a deepening of inductive (top-down) thinking about the role of government, where sweeping political ideologies over-drive people's orientation to specific events. (The alternate I prefer in this CI is deductive exploration of information, a kind of "working up" from evidence, ideally to encourage subtle interrogation of top-down ideologies they may have already acquired.) GENERAL SKETCH A note: I think this CI is probably "unit scale" rather than "semester scale"--it would probably need to be combined with...
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