An 11-Year-Old Student Was Arrested in Florida After Refusing to Stand for the Pledge of Allegiance (Time) For the last few years of her life, Mom and I had DVR service through our (asshole) cable company, but she didn’t care for it all that much. Even if her eyesight hadn’t deteriorated so much that she had to squint with her face three inches away from the television just to see the cable box menus, Mom didn’t tend to adjust well to new technology, unless it…
[Content warning: This blog contains discussions of bullying.] Nathan Phillips says Covington Catholic teens were disrespectful after investigation clears them (USA Today) One of my primary motivators as a teacher, and something I repeat to myself every day I teach, is that I need to be the kind of teacher for my students that I needed when I was younger. This would be a difficult enough task on its own, but as I’ve often pointed out, anyone who gets into teaching because they think it will…
Polar vortex to bring prolonged, life-threatening cold outbreak to midwestern US this week (Accuweather) I’ve been thinking lately about how I’ll probably have to write a multi-volume memoir when the time comes for me to do that, simply because I have far too many bad memories indelibly stamped into my brain to just gloss over those events in a chapter or two. I’m guessing that I’ll need at least one whole book to describe all the horrible teachers I had when I was younger, and…
What the “Grievance Studies” Hoax Actually Reveals (slate.com) Growing up in a city has a way of making you acutely aware of any time that city’s name is mentioned in a national setting, at least if that’s a relatively rare occurrence. Given that I’m old enough to remember when M*A*S*H was winding down its original run on CBS, you’d think that I would have been inured to mentions of Toledo at an early age, but that just didn’t happen; I can still remember watching the Fox…
Trumped up anti-Semitism charges at Rutgers designed to chill free speech | Editorial (nj.com) My experiences of being targeted for special treatment by my high school teachers, just because I had political opinions that differed from theirs, have influenced my teaching career in more ways than I could possibly list in a blog like this; putting aside the positive influences in my life (Mom and the good teachers I had in college), they may be my primary motivation to be a teacher, and to always…