Out of Left Field Friday

Silly season in education politics

It’s a Friday in early August, so why not have crazy education news? You’ve already destroyed our district, but could we at least pretend to open our doors this year? After months of public disavowal by Pennsylvania politicians of any obligation to fund Philadelphia’s schools adequately, Philadelphia superintendent William Hite gave notice yesterday that if […]

One Week, Better Tools (spoof)

While several of my friends have been working hard this week on developing a new digital-humanities tool at One Week | One Tool: A Digital Humanities Barnraising, I’ve been spoofing their original Ideascale site to get feedback on options Monday and Tuesday with One Week, Better Tools. Or as I explain on the site: We’re […]

Do your friends suffer from AUDS?

It has now been decades since the wiser and more humane adults in this society identified the injustice of stigma for all sorts of conditions. We have gone from cancer being the unspoken disease to having well-known charity drives for cancer research and treatment. We have the Americans with Disabilities Act and a solid push […]

The new “trad” Irish folk ensemble

Since plenty of policy bloggers devote Friday to cultural stuff (and in one case fishing adventures), it’s time for me to play my hand. This is a story I reported on my personal blog about 6 years ago, and it still warms my heart. Every other week, Joseph’s friends gather at his house to play […]

Zombies teach grammar

Best grammar teaching tip by Twitter ever: I finally learned how to teach my guys to ID the passive voice. If you can insert “by zombies” after the verb, you have passive voice. — Rebecca Johnson (@johnsonr) October 18, 2012 Let’s see how this works with, say, part of the abstract of Robert Donmoyer’s editorial in […]