back to school

Classes start today. Amazingly, I'm not completely dreading it. By the end of this calendar year, I'll be two classes further towards my goal. Onward.

Best wishes to friends and readers who are also back in school, whether as teachers or students.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

more roku joy: post your pbs and nfb recommendations here

Roku has added an app for PBS! This means we watch music clips from Austin City Limits , and in the winter we'll binge on American Experience history documentaries and American Masters biographies. These documentaries are consistently worth watching, and often truly excellent. On American Masters, we've recently seen "There But For Fortune," about Phil Ochs, and will eventually see bios of Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, Johnny Carson, Mel Brooks, Rosetta Tharpe, and James Baldwin. American Experience has a spate of docs we haven't seen, including "The Abolitionists," and films on the building of the Panama Canal and the Hoover Dam. Roku has also added an app for the National Film Board of Canada ! The choices there are overwhelming, so if you've got NFB recommendations, please post them here. The appearance of these two apps is good news for streaming in general and for Roku in particular. Now that all my TV and movie viewing is on-demand, and I ha...
Read more

"you guys": change language, do no harm, but can we please leave space for learning and growing?

Image
First reactions: the language police I've recently learned that calling a group of people you guys  may be considered insensitive to transgender people.  My first reaction to this was an inner eye-roll, and thoughts along the lines of, "Oh come on, that's going too far."  The same reaction I had to learning that the word crazy  is not to be used -- in any context -- because it's insensitive to people with mental illness. Why are people policing my language this closely? Is this really important? Who determined this is now inappropriate speech? I've always thought of guys  as gender-neutral, and you guys  represents a group of people of any gender -- in the appropriate context. Clearly some people say "guys and girls," and in that context guys means men and boys. But words have different meanings in different contexts, and most speakers of any given language are able to distinguish among those contexts.  Is you guys  really so offensive, to the po...
Read more

let them stay reason # 5: because iraq is an environmental disaster

The sixth of a ten-part series: top ten reasons why US Iraq War Resisters should be allowed to stay in Canada. Reason # 5: from Rex Wyler, ecologist, author and Vietnam War resister. Reason # 6 from Naomi Klein , award-winning author, filmmaker, activist, Canadian. Daughter of war resister. Reason # 7 from Olivia Chow , Member of Parliament. Reason # 8 from Bill King , musician, producer, Vietnam war deserter. Reason # 9 from Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians . Reason # 10 from Alex Neve of Amnesty International . Here's 85,000 more reasons. The Iraqi government has released its first official death toll report. It says 85,000 Iraqis were killed from 2004 to 2008 . Other ongoing sources for civilian death tolls: Iraq Body Count , invasion of Iraq casualties on Wikipedia.
Read more