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Monthly Archives: July 2009

A Community of Learners

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Maxine Greene, on The Teacher in John Dewey’s Works: In “Progressive Education and the Science of Education,” written in 1928, many years after the closing of the Dewey School, Dewey spoke of the importance of progressive teachers presenting to other teachers “for trial and criticism definite and organized bodies of knowledge” along with a listing [...]

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Reading Sarah Palin

Monday, July 13, 2009

I heard from Alice Mercer, recently, curious about Sarah Palin. Here’s what I think: Sarah Palin decided to ditch the actual responsibilities of governor to become a community organizer. Accountability, we all know, is inconvenient, and Sarah finally figured that out. She’s been griping that ethics complaints are using up all her time, and costing [...]

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Competitiveness and Excellence

Friday, July 10, 2009

Competitiveness and excellence are not necessarily related. Competition may lead to excellence, but it may also lead to cheating and lying. Or it may lead to more benign perversions, like data mining and “public relations” initiatives that focus on quality indicators, rather than quality itself. Alfie Kohn’s twitter stream today contained a link to a [...]

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Installing a New iMac Hard Drive

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

It’s been a while since I’ve had a tech story to tell. This one ends OK, but it wasn’t as simple as I’d hoped it would be – as if that ever happens. Last winter our family’s 2006 era iMac began crashing repeatedly, losing the kids’ unsaved English papers and generally pissing us off when [...]

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