The English author, poet, and poet laureate Ted Hughes was, as well, a writer of children’s literature, and in the foreword to Children as Writers 2, a collection of prize-winning pieces in a children’s literary competition run in 1975 by the Daily Mirror newspaper, he made some observations which can only help us adults understand …
Author Archives: rultimo
I’s
I’m not really quite sure how to understand the reasoning behind a new phrasing I’ve heard (but haven’t yet read) a few times now recently. Again just the other day, the host of a podcast said to her guest, By the time your and I’s interview appears, this will be old news. It’s a curious …
You, Not Something Like You
In 1909—well over a century ago now—the English novelist E. M. Forster wrote a short story entitled The Machine Stops, an underground dystopia, a denatured and artificial environment whose inhabitants (can we call them persons any longer?) “mustn’t say anything against the Machine.” One young person does, however, and when over videoconference he asks his …
A Ghost in the Machine?
I heard someone say the other day that he never felt more confident about his writing now that he relied on the assistance of AI, to which a reasonable reply might be that this writer isn’t writing. To feel confident should mean to have faith in one’s own skills, manual or intellectual, and so this …
Home to School
The language arts. How would you go about introducing that subject to the middle schooler you’ve decided to homeschool? A friend of mine in that position asked me this question recently. We are inclined these days to just jump in to something, believing that we’ll understand the why of it later, if we ever do …