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Monthly Archives: October 2009

This Machine Kills Fascists

Friday, October 30, 2009

“A CRISIS is tearing through the American public education system like a tornado,” writes John Green, a member of the California Teachers Association State Council. “It threatens to uproot and overturn everything in its path.” He asks where the California Teachers Association is while teachers face budget cuts, high-stakes testing, the shredding of collective bargaining [...]

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Terra Nullius

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

It’s an old story: If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and [...]

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Owning the Change Process

Monday, October 19, 2009

Today was a professional development day, and as these things go, it wasn’t bad. One thing that helped, I suspect, is that the school district curriculum department piggy-backed onto the Alaska State Literacy Association 2009 conference, so we were able to take advantage of some fresh ideas that weren’t part of the local institutional orthodoxy. [...]

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K’naan

Thursday, October 1, 2009

K’naan is from Mogadishu, Somalia. His family moved to New York in 1991 to escape the Somali civil war, and then later, to Toronto, Ontario. His aunt, Magool, was one of Somalia’s most famous singers. His grandfather, Haji Mohamed, was a poet. K’naan means “traveller” in the Somali language. I heard his song, Wavin’ Flag, [...]

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An Ecology of Adolescent Literacy

Thursday, October 1, 2009

This post is tangential to a series of posts that Tom Hoffman has done recently, in which he eviscerates the new Common Core(porate) English Language Arts Standards. I don’t see category links on his blog, so maybe the best place to look for them all at this point is in the monthly archive. He summarized [...]

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