How to Fully Reopen the Public Schools By 2026

The first step in reopening schools is figuring out what the actual, mathematical 6-foot social distanced capacity of the school is. Add a margin for error–or for children pretending to be dinosaurs. Room by room. If everything runs perfectly, how many children can be in this room? What if it doesn’t go perfectly? Guess what?

No, Really… If you could do anything….

I ran into this TED Talk the other day. And even though it was nested in among such gems as “Your Vagina is Not a Car,” a highly intellectual search for hidden meaning in Kubrick’s version of The Shining, and assortment of official and unofficial music videos, it stuck with me. If you ask teenagers

Gifted Children, Education, and Abuse

I spent a lot of time locked in the library, when I was a kid. Just to be clear, I don’t mean visiting the library, or absorbed in reading at the library, or gee, I was one of those kids who always begged their parents to take them to the library. I mean locked in.

Next Time, I’m Choosing the Movie

Recently, I was dragged out, kicking and screaming to see Christopher Nolan’s movie Dunkirk. I may have mentioned before that World War II movies are not my thing. Every last gram of interest in the subject was wrung out of me in high school (During a time when Every day was a World War II

Unlearning What They Done Learned Me in School

One of my (many) leftover hangups from grade school is a terror of red ink. Something about those pencils they used to give us. A shuffle of papers later, and you’re grading somebody else’s work and hoping against hope that you don’t have to flunk anyone, and that you didn’t do anything too humiliating, yourself.

Dreams Without a Sell-By Date

I was talking to a coworker… or maybe this is a theme, and it’s just suddenly becoming obvious… But, it was one of those “At my age” conversations. So, here she is, in a job that she hates, coming off the last job that she hated, and which finally just hit the boiling point. Just

Name The Crime

I ran across a headline in Jezebel (not my usual reading) yesterday. “After Body-Shaming a Fellow Gym Patron, Dani Mathers Will Be Tried in Court” Body Shaming? Well, don’t get me wrong. She definitely did that, too. (Allegedly, but in an already admitted it in an online video, and apologized, but really doesn’t want a

A-to-Z Challenge: Content Management System

A content management system is basically a computer program that manages content, and typically the content of a website. So… well… WordPress springs to mind. There are plenty of choices out there. So, once upon a time, I had some grade school teachers who decided (or possibly were told) that computers were the wave of

Field Trips to Nowhere

When I was a kid, school field trips were a matter of piling into cars driven by “class mothers” and going… somewhere… There were usually about eighteen kids in my class, and yes, that includes the year that was 5th and 6th grade combined. (Well, we only had three 6th graders!) The thing about “class

Messages From the Bathroom Stall Door

I used a public restroom, today, and I snapped a picture of the stall door. Someone has written the words Suicide Club on the stainless steel in electric youth pink. I don’t know if it’s a plea for help, or a bid for attention, or just graffiti referencing a movie or manga. And I don’t know

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