a country girl circa 1930
Paul Bush

(aka Prof P Bush)

A working portfolio of writing,
 teaching and photography.

Welcome to a work in progress: a reflection of my interests and effort.

“There was a big god damn hole and we just kept dumping. . . All white and green and purple. That was our job all day long. We used to make the rounds of every building that had any kind of effluent. . . All that leftover junk’s been thrown in there.  That’s no good for you.  It’s all bad. I was thinking, Christ, it’s got to be getting into the water, where is it going to go?

Arkey Dedarian, long-time employee of the Monsanto chemical plant in Chicopee, Mass. 

In 1981, fellow reporter Don Michak and I, with a grant for the Fund for Investigative Journalism, looked into hazardous waste dumping, cancer rates and more at a Monsanto plant, writing a series of articles for the Valley Advocate, including “Monsanto’s Bottomless Pits” which this is excerpted from.  A few years later, after more freelancing, I moved into editing magazines.

Teaching consumes most of my days. 
It’s a challenging experience that demands creativity.

A screen capture of OneNote

Years in the college classroom have shown me that hands-on learning works best.  Each week my journalism students contribute to The Exchange, a weekly online newspaper that they produce.  You can find it here.

I’ve built it around a support system where students get feedback from each other, as well as upper class students who have more experience.  As students progress through my classes they’re exposed to ever greater challenges – and they respond well to them.

 

This summer I began putting together readings in OneNote journals, with one per class.  I wanted to experiment with alternatives to textbooks, which many students find expensive. 


I like the ease with which I can assemble material, pulling in links to up-to-the-minute articles. I think the next step in this project is to organize the readings so that they’re clustered in manageable groups that students can easily identify.

another OneNote screenshot
front page of the Exchange, a weekly online paper

Related to teaching: I have answered a number of questions on the site, Quora.com,
dealing with everything from advice to college students to writing.