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Category Archives: commonplaces

scrapbook items/notable extracts from other works

Night Visions: Celebrations in Failing Light

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 [...]

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Reading Wendell Berry

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 [...]

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Home for the Holidays

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 [...]

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Peace on Earth

Sunday, December 6, 2009

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 [...]

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Reading Free

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 [...]

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Acknowledgments

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 [...]

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Inspired

Thursday, November 26, 2009

The corporate perversion of public schooling is making inroads here through what we are all coming to know as “progress monitoring,” delivered locally through an expensive corporately packaged iteration of RTI, which tracks meaningless data (counting words read correctly in a timed reading) and churns out pretty graphs, while doing nothing to increase the professional [...]

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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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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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…Or Maybe Heaven After You’re Dead

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

This seems like a good time to call up this video narrated by Alan Watts, Life and Music, which Artichoke posted many, many months ago. I mentioned it to one of the other teachers I work with as an aside during a presentation on RTI at a staff meeting this afternoon. (AIMSweb is a progress [...]

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