In the middle of Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett, I came across a funny/insightful passage I thought I might blog about — only to discover that it has its own Wikipedia page. 📚
A very happy boy after playing in the hose.
Sometimes teaching — or the kind of teaching I do, anyway — forces you to confront certain dramatic juxtapositions, as I was recently reminded.
I’m delighted that Davide Mascioli, who had first thought of the Space Exploration Logo Archive as a website, decided to turn it into a series of booklets.
Truthless. I am psyched. I would be under any circumstances but especially because of my long career as a fabulist.
My question for those who make an economic defense of the liberal arts is always this: If the liberal arts cease to be financially rewarding, will you cease defending them?
Bruce Herman, “Meditation”
I’m going to spend some time with my first-years today discussing the skill of critical ignoring. First step: encouraging them to remember that any claim made without evidence can and should be dismissed without evidence.
At this stage of a campaign season, journalism consists largely of frantically shouting at people who would never in a million years vote for Candidate X that they shouldn’t vote for Candidate X.
There’s no major topic in American media that’s covered with less openness to new perspectives than education, no subject that’s more of a citadel for establishment narratives and business-as-usual. And none more obviously cries out for real rebel thinking; it’s a subject that’s considered of massive public importance, governed by a sclerotic and self-righteous conventional wisdom, where the “reform” agenda has produced decades of failure despite all of its no-excuses rhetoric. We spend extravagantly in this country, to no avail, and yet people still insist that it’s a funding problem. We institute endless school-side accountability programs, nothing gets better, and yet people still insist it’s an accountability problem. The whole education experience of the last 50 years proves that our issues cannot be solved at the school side, and yet no arguments to that effect are made in establishment media.
At Padre Island National Seashore you can drive on the beach — if you have a 4-wheel drive vehicle, you can do that for sixty miles, until you come to Mansfield Channel, which separates the North and South islands.
