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Only Connect: November 2011
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On a life of liberal education. Sunday, November 27, 2011. What do you need? Buy Nothing Day 2001 Revisited. On my facebook page, I just linked to a news article that questions, "How did Black Friday come to this? And you won't be sorry), and I sat myself, and my wife of two weeks, outside the King of Prussia Mall "Lord and Taylor" entrance. The rest? Yeah, go read up on Swarm Mentality and check out Stephen Johnson's Emergence.). Ain't no difference to me. Around 6:30 AM and sat on a round concrete obje...
bigstyrofoamthings.blogspot.com
Only Connect: September 2012
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On a life of liberal education. Saturday, September 8, 2012. Musical Chairs and the "Real World". I recently read an commentary from the Teachers College Record on the importance of empathy in education/life. (Because, really, can we separate the two? I mean, I know we've tried to take the life out of education, and to look at the lives of students as being devoid of educational experiences.but seriously? From my point of view, we have to think about education and its associated grades as linked to teach...
bigstyrofoamthings.blogspot.com
Only Connect: Panic in the (Brain) Attic
http://bigstyrofoamthings.blogspot.com/2014/08/my-brain-nice-closet-huh-my-brain-right.html
On a life of liberal education. Friday, August 29, 2014. Panic in the (Brain) Attic. Nice closet, huh? Yeah That's my brain right now. It's burgeoning with ideas, as this closet is bursting with.um.stuff. It's somewhat organized but one system of organization seems to get in the way of another system of organization. Or maybe systems are competing with one another. I have tried to focus on just one thing at a time, but like those dogs in the movie Up. I'm easily distracted, and one "squirrel! My teacher ...
bigstyrofoamthings.blogspot.com
Only Connect: February 2011
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On a life of liberal education. Saturday, February 12, 2011. Language and Reality- Taylor Mali and the Word. I've been out of touch with poetry for a while. I missed last year's Geraldine R. Dodge festival for the first time in over 16 years and I've not patrolled the web for the hip, spoken-word poets as much as I want to. Three kids, teaching, union responsibilities and all manners of other things that make the world too much with me late.ly. In more proper terms, I'm a word snob. Mark Rupple was my 11...
bigstyrofoamthings.blogspot.com
Only Connect: April 2015
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On a life of liberal education. Saturday, April 11, 2015. What Counts in Education and Why. My title here alludes to a quip by, Einstein, I believe: "Not everything that matters can be counted; not everything that can be counted matters.". I've been thinking a lot about my former teachers lately. Maybe it was the quip that my colleague at the High School made about my corduroy sports coat and our former German teacher, Gordon. Or maybe it was this blog post. Links to this post. Subscribe to: Posts (Atom).
bigstyrofoamthings.blogspot.com
Only Connect: March 2011
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On a life of liberal education. Thursday, March 24, 2011. The Tragedy, The "Shirt", And Fires of the Mind. Tomorrow, March 25, 2011, will mark the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City. The fire killed 146 workers, mostly immigrant women. The horror of the event cannot be understated (see these photos. And the effect of the tragedy on labor rules and workers rights in America ranks the fire among the most important events in the labor movement. My point here has somet...
bigstyrofoamthings.blogspot.com
Only Connect: Stranger in a Strange Land
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On a life of liberal education. Thursday, September 4, 2014. Stranger in a Strange Land. One of the most stressful aspects of moving from the Middle School to the High School this year has been the culture shock. Sure, I was expecting the basic, "Oh.So that's how they do it here," as well as the time it'll take to get acclimated to the layout, the numbers of students, the way people are spread out all over the place. This is the HS I went to). Is this ever going to change? Enjoying reading these- always ...
bigstyrofoamthings.blogspot.com
Only Connect: September 2011
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On a life of liberal education. Monday, September 5, 2011. And so it begins. The start of every school year finds me the same as every other day of the year.searching for new ways to think about and practice education. This year finds me prodding my colleagues, entreating them to reconnect with their own passions and the passions of their students for compulsion only leads to coercion which rarely produces any kind of positive, long-term results. The other day I ran across this quotation:. One might argu...
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A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: March 2008
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A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. Saturday, March 15, 2008. I tried to describe it once in a more creative fashion:. It was far more pleasurable to pity and be pitied. Comfort often comes at the expense of truth. It was the opportunity to feel sorrow, to risk. Nothing more. He paused. Did he really believe that? Was that really the truth? But it wasn't true. He suffered needlessly and stupidly, without wisdom and without reason. This was the bane of his existence and he clutched it with a desperate di...A few...
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Only Connect: And So to Be...
http://bigstyrofoamthings.blogspot.com/2014/08/and-so-to-be.html
On a life of liberal education. Thursday, August 28, 2014. And So to Be. After twenty years or so designing, teaching, and evolving a class based upon the principles of design and reading the world, I've decided to accept an offer from my district to teach English to gifted freshman and sophomores. The decision wasn't easy. My life's work was in moving my thinking and ideas away from purely text-based interpretations of the world. And it is in that allowance for design that I found my point of departure.
