Category Archives: politics

Teachers Are Not Your Canaries

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If You Weren’t Afraid to Send Your Kids Back to School, DeVos’ Disastrous Interview Might Change That (Rolling Stone)‘Scared for my life,’ but needing a salary: Teachers weigh risks as COVID-19 looms (USA Today via MSN) In researching the history of education in America for my next book, I’m constantly struck by how so many of the battles being fought today are similar to ones being fought decades, or even a century, ago. From big corporations trying to force their ideas of “appropriate subject material”…

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Agonizing

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Wisconsin Breaks Single-Day COVID-19 Case Record (Patch via Yahoo! News)‘A Nightmare’: Georgia Tech Faculty Push Back Against In-Person Reopening Plans (NPR) I’ve always been a very passionate person, and one of the advantages of working as a teacher is that my job allows me to channel my passions in very productive ways. I care very deeply about improving the lives of other people, and my work allows me to do that improvement in a very hands-on way, something that lets me get immediate feedback on…

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Every Day, in Every Way

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My generation was supposed to be the “short attention span” generation, at least according to many of the adults around me when I was younger. Their thinking went that since we grew up with MTV just always there in our lives, we wouldn’t be able to focus on anything for longer than four minutes or so. The rise of social media and smartphone-toting adolescents led to its own wave of ballyhooing about how 140-character tweets would lead to a newer generation of young people being…

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The Struggle Continues

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About six years ago, before the Supreme Court decision Obergefell vs. Hodges legalised marriage equality in all fifty states, I heard a common refrain from many of my students that went something like this. “I think I’m a conservative. I don’t like high taxes, and I believe in limited government, but you know what? The conservatives in politics are the same people who are keeping my gay friends from getting married. I can’t accept that, so when I went to vote for the first time,…

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Four Dead in Ohio

personal, politics, rhetoric, teaching Leave a comment

As meaningful as today’s fiftieth anniversary of the Kent State Massacre is for me, I have to admit that my thoughts these past few days have been far more personal. On top of planning to go to the remembrance ceremonies that had been scheduled before the COVID-19 pandemic brought so much of our lives to a standstill, travelling to Kent would have meant that I’d have gotten the chance to visit Toledo for the first time since I moved out over two years ago, and…

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