There have been times when I’ve had to rush just to get a blog up so I don’t go a whole calendar month without blogging, but I’ve never had to do it under this level of sleep deprivation. My life has gotten incredibly hectic in the past few months, and even though I’m on break from teaching for the next two and a half weeks, I’ve got so many other things I need to get to while I’m on “vacation” that I’m not getting much…
AZ gov vetoes ‘religious freedom’ bill, Ohio lawmakers abandon kindred bill (examiner.com) School will allow boy to bring My Little Pony backpack (USA Today) We liberals, or at least the majority of us, often get unfairly maligned as being some kind of “thought police” trying to tell people what they should or shouldn’t think. I think I can speak for the vast majority of liberals, and hopefully people as a whole, when I say that what goes on in your head is no one’s business…
Papers show Koch money behind economic study (The Rachel Maddow Show) My teaching styles and philosophies can be traced back to a number of intellectual leaders, including the American educator and philosopher John Dewey. His treatise Experience and Education is probably his most famous work; in it he proposes the radical idea (sadly, almost as radical now as it was seventy-five years ago) that instead of treating students like a bunch of empty vessels we should unthinkingly pour “knowledge” into, we teachers should treat our…
Rand Paul On Plagiarism Claims: ‘It Annoys The Hell Out Of Me’ (Washington Post) Although I haven’t even been out of high school for twenty years (but I’m still having lots of nightmares about my high school experiences to this day), the advances in research technology made in just that short span of time mean that my experience as a high school student is worlds removed from what my students went through in high school. CD-ROM technology was just becoming common in schools when I…
NRA Newtown response: National program to place armed security in schools (Yahoo! News) One of the most vivid memories of my teaching career came a few days before I taught my first composition class as a graduate assistant at the University of Toledo. I’d been a research assistant my first year, but for some reason I was put in the meeting with the second-year TAs before the start of the term despite my lack of practical teaching experience. We brought our planned syllabi to the…