It’s been over a month since I posted a Red Rhetor Digest (in fact, nearly two months), so this is my attempt to get back into the swing of delivering some content regularly. I have so many links saved up that I haven’t read or shared, so here’s a small sampling:
1. No Other Moment Besides (Nathaniel Rivers)
Nathaniel responds to popular discourses about “kids these days,” not so much interested in the truth of these discourses, but rather about their effects: “I care about what these stories and their incessant telling do to us. I care about what they do to students. How do these stories position our students? As problems to be solved? As a jumble of symptoms to be treated? We learn nothing about ourselves as teachers this way. My advice, for what’s it worth, is to follow the students. Take everything they say at face value. This is no mere naïveté that I am proposing: students are neither saints nor angels. They are people, and people are complex from moment to moment.”
2. Something Terrible (Dean Trippe)
Dean Trippe has made his autobiographic fan comic available for free via this Dropbox link. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m looking forward to it.
3. Fall is the Worst Season (Jezebel)
This is a beautifully written diatribe against Fall that hilariously addresses and dismantles any claim that Fall is indeed a great season. I wish I could just quote the entire thing here. But let’s just say that “seasons always get better, with one exception: Fall is the only season after which the next is definitely worse”—and “Fall is as superficially blissful as it is internally deceptive, but winter has the exact same surface and essence. It’s pain as opposed to anxiety. It’s preferable to fall in the same way that I’d rather be dead than thinking about it.”
