“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it’s no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.” ― Elizabeth Strout, Abide With Me … Read More ›
Education
Every Child Known. Every System Protected.
“The problem isn’t who is in charge. It’s what is in charge. The problem is that people are encouraged to function as machines. Or, actually, as mechanisms. Human emotion and sympathy are unprofessional. They are inappropriate to the exercise of… Read More ›
Somebody Is Always in the Teacher’s Ear
“Everything will be alright in the end, so if it is not alright, it is not the end.” — Deborah Moggach, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel Teaching is a weird profession. It is one of the few professions where the… Read More ›
Something Is Going On Over on Bransford Avenue
“Whatever happens to human beings trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.” ― Sissela Bok Something is going on over on Bransford Avenue. Hard to figure out exactly what it is. But something is going on. The rumblings… Read More ›
The Day the Hyphens Disappeared
“Whenever purity is paramount, terror is close at hand.” ― Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 Twenty-five years ago, the world changed. People older than me remember exactly where they were when JFK was… Read More ›
The Light She Left Behind
“Those we love don’t go away, they sit beside us every day.” — Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies Forgive us if we are a little sad here in Tennessee. We lost a shining light this week when Dolly Parton departed… Read More ›
Under the Lights, the Truth Is Harder to Hide
“The problem is that progress stopped making sense. More and more of us looked up one day and realized that the emperor had no clothes.” ― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility… Read More ›
“Follow the Science” — Right Up Until It Asks an Inconvenient Question
“But I don’t want to be Godly. I just want to be good.” ― Caradog Prichard, One Moonlit Night I’ve got a couple of pet peeves, which probably won’t surprise anybody who has been reading me for more than… Read More ›
The Silly Season Comes to School
“What is truth?” Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability… Read More ›
READY OR NOT, HERE THEY COME
“She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old enough to know the difference between intriguing and fucked up. ‘You should go for younger women,’ she advised me. ‘They can’t always tell.’” —Tana French, In the Woods All good things must… Read More ›
