Skip to content

Category Archives: commonplaces

scrapbook items/notable extracts from other works

Sinnerman – Nina Simone

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Where you gonna run to? Sinnerman Oh Sinnerman, where you gonna run to? Sinnerman, where you gonna run to? Where you gonna run to? All along dem day Well I run to the rock, please hide me I run to the rock, please hide me I run to the rock, please hide me, Lord All [...]

Also filed in | | Comments (1)

Lost Offshore Oil Rig Blues

Sunday, May 30, 2010

We hear, now, there are giant plumes of oil rolling around beneath the surface of the Gulf, and that BP, not the Coast Guard, is running the show. We’ve also learned that we can expect it to get worse in the near term, despite the best efforts of BP and the Obama administration to reassure [...]

Also filed in borderland, politics | | Comments (4)

Standing Up for Common Sense

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Every once in a while, there is good news: Alaska opts out of Race to the Top school grants TOO MUCH CHANGE: State leery after failures of the No Child Left Behind Act. By Jeremy Hsieh The Associated Press While many states have accepted an educational reform challenge in the federal Race to the Top [...]

Also filed in borderland, education, politics | | Comments (2)

Black Waves

Sunday, May 2, 2010

It’s not just beaches and birds. VALDEZ, Alaska — The toll of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill is a sadly familiar one: 250,000 dead birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals–all victims of the oil tanker that ran over a reef late one April night and drained 11 million gallons of oil into Prince [...]

Also filed in borderland | | Comments (2)

Capitalism : Bottled Water : : Democrats : Education Reform

Sunday, April 11, 2010

The Obama administration’s education reform policy is a scam, just like bottled water – a capitalist scheme to manufacture markets through the privatization of public wealth. Race to the Top and the ESEA Blueprint are education “reform” mechanisms that use test scores to label schools as failing, thereby creating incentives for states to relax charter [...]

Also filed in borderland, education, politics | | Comments (6)

We Are In Deep Doo Doo

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Lois Weiner, who has been documenting the global neoliberal assault on teachers, posted a critique of Diane Ravitch’s new book on her blog today that is worth every public school teacher’s attention. Weiner: The publicity for Ravitch’s book has certainly put her incisive critique of the reforms (privatizing education; using standardized tests to measure everything; [...]

Also filed in borderland, education, politics | | Comments (13)

The Right Kind of Education

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 [...]

Also filed in borderland, education | | Comments (3)

Central Falls – could be ANYWHERE

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 [...]

Also filed in borderland, education, politics | | Comments (3)

Howard Zinn

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 [...]

Also filed in borderland, curriculum, politics | | Comments (1)

The Corporation – A Legal “Person”

Monday, January 25, 2010

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 [...]

Also filed in borderland, politics | | Comments (5)