Although my early years were spent in the tail end of the Cold War — I was already a teenager when the Berlin Wall came down — I wasn’t educated about the threat of nuclear war when I was younger. I never took part in any drills about what to do in the event of a bomb strike, and it wasn’t until I was much older that I understood what all that “Duck and Cover” stuff was really about. (Strangely enough, my first taste of…
Conceptualizing three-dimensional space has always been an issue for me. While I’m somewhat good at designing things in two dimensions — the graphical elements of my website and my book covers, for example — my brain has always had a very difficult time wrapping itself around the most basic elements of three-dimensional design. Anyone who has seen my laughable attempts at drawing can tell you just how messed up my head is in that regard. I have depth perception and two good eyes; I just…
Mom was fond of calling me a “Bicentennial Baby,” since I was born in 1976. It’s not a term that I’ve heard very often outside of my family; earlier this year I used it when I was talking with a grocery store worker, who said that he thought I was too young to be wearing the Nirvana t-shirt I had on, when he asked what year I was born, and he just smiled and shook his head. From what I’ve seen of the first two seasons…
Since I mentioned my beloved Detroit Red Wings in my last blog, I suppose that some of you are wondering how I feel about them missing the playoffs for the first time in a quarter-century this past season. First of all, given that Mom passed away less than a month into the regular season, it was pretty much impossible for me to feel any kind of emotional attachment to the team in the wake of everything else that was going on around me. Honestly, I…
I’ve mentioned before, on several occasions, that one of the most profound and affecting lessons I learned about being a teacher, back when I was still reading up on pedagogical basics, is that when you don’t teach that something is capable of being changed, then you teach — through your silence — that it can never be changed. This doesn’t mean that change is likely, or that attempts to change won’t be met with strong resistance, or that teachers shouldn’t caution students about the difficulties…