One of my colleagues has a huge “Why?” sign on hir office wall. Well, here is one answer. I present to you, with no English-teacher snark, an email I received from a humanities student the other day: Hello Ma’am! I was just writing to tell you about my awesome trip over break. We went to Nashville and were able to go to the Hermitage, which was Andrew Jacksons home after he served as president. We learned so much from where the slaves lived, to where Andrew slept, to seeing their graves. As we toured the home it was very awesome, and I actually knew one of the lithorgraphs and its creator on the wall, and the tour guide who knew EVERYTHING had no idea. I would not had known if it was not for humanities. I felt smart;) Read more
‘Flakes on the Ballot
There aren’t any hotly contested elections in my district, so I hadn’t been paying particularly close attention to the local races. It wasn’t until lunch today that I sat down to take a close look at the material I’d been accumulating, to make sure I could head into the booth as a reasonably informed voter. Nothing tremendously surprising emerged, but I was intrigued by one school board race (for what it’s worth, both candidates are 40-ish women; political affiliations aren’t indicated in school board races): Incumbent: graduate of SLAC, BA in government, senior-level position in fairly generic information business. Talking points focus on “raising achievement for all students” and dealing with nuts and bolts issues such as finding Read more