Daily Blues & Views

In times like these, it's useful to see what our finest minds have to say.             From Rebecca Solnit: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/15/rebecca-solnit-hope-in-the-dark-new-essay-embrace-unknown

I read an article this morning about the mythology surrounding the first Thanksgiving.  Like all holidays in this country, it's been twisted and transformed, co-opoted and swallowed up by our consumer culture. The piece I read explained that there were no Pilgrims, rather Puritans, and that, the first Thanksgiving feast wasn't actually a pleasant affair, but rather a survival meal that hardly contained the mighty away of offerings found in most homes today. The tribe present was the Wampanoag, whose name translated to "People of the Dawn." How appropriate, I thought, on this Thanksgiving day with the confrontation going on over the North Dakota pipeline and the pall surrounding these United States after the recent election to recall the people of the dawn. As the song says, the sun will come up tomorrow, so we do well to take some inspiration from telling our truths, especially to the new power structure on the horizon. I was reminded too of that Ron Cobb cartoon...

People who don't think like I think               are what I've been thinking about. I hope you know some who see the world through a very different lens than you do                             They will make you think. I have fears too,      seems to me those who share the views of my friend Tim are burdened by their fears in a different way, they feel they are playing for keeps even more than I do;           they seem terrified/calm They nurture themselves with the soft feel of gunmetal and see the Second Amendment as a framed portrait unable to fade or be re-framed when the paper yellows and the print blurs,                    1790 never felt so right, Tim is sensitive to education, his lack and my surfeit,                     ...

This is the day we've been waiting for; the day we elect a President and settle some other political races as well as a handful of ballot measures has finally come.  Rather than a collective sigh of relief, we need to brace ourselves for the flood of emotions sure to follow as we process what it means to win and lose this time around. Our wounds have been exposed and our underbelly revealed to be far softer and uglier than we may have realized. This we need to see as a positive, lest we get lazy and ignore more of our history and fail to see how easily a moral compass can get lost. As an educator, I see the role of our educational institutions far more crucial this time.  Because so many people are getting their news either from social media or networks that are narrow in scope we seem to have limited opportunity for real discussion and dialogue with opposing viewpoints.  What passes for debate/discussions could never be acceptable in most classrooms I know.  But w...

Now and then I'll think about somebody for the first time in a good while.  I sometimes remember people I went to school with or a friend I knew briefly in a college course. Often it is a childhood friend or acquaintance who occupied a brief space in elementary school, Boy Scouts or Little League. Sometimes it's a former colleague I worked with for only a few years or even one year. So many of those young teachers appeared and were gone within the space of one school year. Something will remind us of the person time or place.  Case in point, I once taught next to a teacher whose name was John Brown.  This was at a poor middle school in the Richmond ghetto of Northern California.  The student population was mostly Black and Latino, with a smattering of poor white kids and SE Asian refugee groups that included Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao. So here were Mr. Brown and Mr. Greene virtually next to each other in the hallway of the main building.  Both of us were i...

We could hardly have known it at the time.  Known that there might be a way that we, as teachers, could keep track of how some of our students were doing long after they exited our classrooms for the last time.  Of course, there are some teachers who couldn't care less.  Just a few, in my view.  But for most of us, we care about the people our former charges are becoming. When I retired from full-time teaching I knew very little about Facebook.  Other than it involved being "friends" with one's peers, it was mostly used by college students and had just begun to infiltrate the universe of high schoolers.  That was only 10 years ago.  Since stumbling on to my own account on Facebook, mostly to sign an Amnesty International petition, I've been able to have contact with a few hundred students from about 25 years ago to the present.  I rarely ask them to friend me, as a sign of respect for their privacy.  But if they find me and request "frien...

When I heard the news, I gasped.  Breathtaking.  Bob Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I fact checked lest I had been tricked by the artifice of the internet.  There it was in the New York Times. I let it            sink                       in. By the end of the day I brought myself back to my high school graduation weekend.  The Saturday night following my speech at graduation, in February of 1965 I went to a party with and for my classmates.  The Beatles were hot and hotter that month.  But a specific memory came to me of standing in a circle talking about music with my friends.  I was defending a particular singer, an unusual performer I'd recently learned about through my best friend.  Bob Dylan...the guy who wrote some of the Peter Paul and Mary songs and the guy with the very folkie sound who recorded my favorite song of the previo...