The first walk around my neighborhood in three months reveals what I had suspected: any sign of spring is way underground. My sycamores are still skeletal. The locusts are still wearing a few of their blackened seed pods, like they forgot to take off their eyeliner after a great party. Everywhere I looked for a […]
Read More ExpresswaysI know, you want to help people. Change lives! Reach out to the disenfranchised! Create educational equality in an unequal world! My goal was to do all that, and to make it through five years in teaching. More than half of our new teachers in America quit before five years. In schools with lots of […]
Read More Getting Your Sea Legs, or The Secrets of My (Wobbly, Five-Year) SuccessThis week I drank a glass of merlot at happy hour. It was no big deal to anyone except me. For many years, I gave up alcohol for Lent. I felt like I needed to rethink my ritual, so I decided I would be easier on myself. I’m calling this a “soft Lent.” I would […]
Read More Size MattersI think the leeches are the people who benefit from the military fighting in the Middle East to ensure your supply of oil, the NIH studying flu viruses and developing vaccines, OSHA keeping their workplace safe, and the Department of Labor limiting their work hours to a manageable level. The people who drive over federally funded bridges and interstates and accept federal student grants, and then claim the federal government is unresponsive and worthless, and say they don’t want to contribute to it, in fact, say they want to take it apart and return us to some kind of backward Articles of Confederation when we agreed in 1789 that that was a dumb idea.
Read More Not Robin Hood. Not Lionhearted. Just Wise.
