Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Remembered After 100 Years (DNAinfo.com) Almost every semester I teach, at some point in the term I have reason to bring up the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catching fire in the sixties. The reaction from my students is always the same: “What? How can a river catch fire?” When I explain to them how polluted the river was and call up some Google Images photos of the fire, though, they seem to understand. (As I teach in Michigan and nearly all my…
Pa. teacher strikes nerve with ‘lazy whiners’ blog (AP via Bloomberg BusinessWeek) I haven’t been paying much attention to news and politics lately, in part because I’m so busy with writing projects right now, and in part because I’m just getting so frustrated with it all. For a while I seemed to have much more patience with those who disagreed with me, no matter how illogical or inhumane I considered their views, but over the past year it’s gotten a lot harder to do that. …
I often talk to my students about the ways in which arguments are framed. Anyone, with enough time and research skills, can find a way to set up an argument that, on its surface, will seem devastating, if not scary. Take, for example, Republican claims in 2004 that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was the most liberal member of the Senate — even more liberal than his Massachusetts counterpart, Ted Kennedy — and was thus too radical to become President. Technically Kerry was judged to…
Apologies for not blogging for such a long period of time. As I’ve mentioned before, I finished the rough draft of my first novel this past May, and after “letting it rest” for three months — basically letting myself forget about it completely so I could come back to it with fresh eyes and really see what did and didn’t work in it (the story is great but my language is too bare) — I began editing the rough draft a couple of weeks ago. …
The Case Against Summer Vacation (time.com) Last month when I wrote my “Open Letter to Retail Stores” about stores putting up back-to-school displays waytoo early in the summer and depressing children, one of my friends in NorthCarolina wrote back to tell me that many schools there are operating on a year-round basis, staggering student terms so that some students were starting school in July. I talked with another North Carolinean about this, and although the economic advantage of keeping classrooms operating the whole year is…