Sunday, February 28, 2010
The title of this post is taken from Chapter 2 of Krishnamurti’s Education and the Significance of Life, which I was reminded of while reading Larry Cuban’s blog about Great Teachers:
For the past quarter-century, however, policymakers and politicians have chopped, grated, and mixed together the goals of schooling into a concoction seeking to make education [...]
Friday, February 26, 2010
“Teaching really is not a job. I don’t teach; I’m a teacher. I’m a teacher. That’s who I am.”
… but, obviously, it’s a hell of a long way from Wall Street:
Mr. Dimon said he did not know whether he would have taken the $25 billion that the government lent to JPMorgan during the 2008 [...]
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Howard Zinn died today of a heart attack. He was 87. The AP published a short biography in memorium.
Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, “A People’s History” was, fittingly, a people’s best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although [...]
Maybe you’ve heard that the Supreme Court ruled there should be no limits on corporate campaign contributions, finding that “the government has no business regulating political speech.” This follows from the corporation’s status as a person, and money’s ability to talk, legally speaking. Consequently, a movement to legalize democracy is taking shape.
The video clip below [...]
Monday, December 21, 2009
There’s not much sunlight in the interior of Alaska these days. Today is the winter solstice, and we have just about three and a half hours of daylight to work with. At this latitude the sun barely climbs above the horizon at mid-day, and it has virtually no warmth. Bit still, it’s reassuring to see [...]
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Reading Wendell Berry’s Citizenship Papers, I see that Berry’s “agrarian argument” might also serve to counter the corporate ethos which has dominated the rhetoric of education reform for several decades, and which is now being carried forward by the Obama administration. The agrarian argument asserts the responsibility everyone has to care for that which everyone [...]
Saturday, December 12, 2009
There’s a week of school left before Christmas break. It’s tough to keep everyone focused, me included, so I’m going to run with that and indulge a bit of randomness here.
Over the course of the 30 years I’ve lived in Alaska, I’ve traveled Outside only a couple of times on holiday vacations, and I’m [...]
Pacem In Terris:
But first We must speak of man’s rights. Man has the right to live. He has the right to bodily integrity and to the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, and, finally, the necessary social services. In consequence, he has the right to [...]
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Dina Strasser and I have begun a joint blogging venture, comparing notes on our reading classrooms this year. We set up a project blog called Reading Free, and plan to exchange posts there. I’m interested in this from a couple of different angles, one of them being the use of social media to support collaborative [...]
Sunday, November 29, 2009
The Borderland blog passed its fifth anniversary this month, and I want to recognize some people. Five years is a long time to work on something. For me, at least.
I started writing here just after GW Bush’s second term election. I had not read any blogs at all before that, and I had no ambition [...]
