Oh Hell N-O

Unwieldy bill would destroy higher education in Ohio | American Historical Association (news.yahoo.com)“‘Don’t just publish another paper. Let’s do something,’ says scholar-advocate Cindy Blackstock (universityaffairs.ca) As spring passes, a handful of elementary schools across America will still devote their last day to outdoor activities for their students, to help them blow off the stress of the past academic year. (Far fewer schools are doing this than was the case when I was younger, with the push to pass all those standardized tests and all that…

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Too Old for This

Before this year, the last time I sprained my knee was back at the end of 2001, when my family and I were still living in a hotel room following the house fire earlier that spring. I was walking down some stairs, my left foot slipped out from under me, and in an attempt to catch myself, I somehow landed with my left leg underneath me. It was probably a miracle that I didn’t break something, but my knee was basically shot. As luck would…

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Losing Placement

The controversy over AP African-American Studies, explained (vox.com)NCAA eliminates ACT and SAT scores (The Bulletin) Throughout my high school years, there was a lot of pressure put on us students at the abattoir to enroll in as many AP classes as we could. We were constantly told that not only would taking these classes be expected at the top-tier colleges that most of us were expected to apply to, but that high scores on the AP tests would allow us to skip a lot of…

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Erasing History, Erasing People

The DeSantis administration’s ban on AP African American studies ‘is eroding traditional pubhlic education’ in Florida, state school board member says (Business Insider via msn.com) One of the central pieces of the right-wing attack on academia in the late eighties and early nineties, which resulted in the phrase “politically correct’ entering mainstream American discourse, was the debate over Stanford University changing one of its course requirements for all first-year students there. As the university community debated the changes, conservatives were quick to point to a…

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Making It True

[This blog contains descriptions of child abuse.] One of the worst beatings my father ever gave me came in response to me asserting a truth. I was eleven or twelve years old, and I don’t remember how we got into an argument, but I remember it having something to do with me not being able to make something stand upright. My father was yelling at me because he thought I could never get this thing to stand upright, even though I had done so before…

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