Summer transitions
Two transitions are on my mind today. First, a short drive in the last hour was probably the last time this summer I will sit by my son as he drives to his volunteer hours at the local animal shelter. Assuming he passes his road test in the very near future, he’ll have a driver’s […]
Public protests are not policy workshops
I’m not at the Save our Schools march today in D.C. but I am reading coverage (including the Twitter feed for #sosmarch). I think a number of observers such as John Merrow and Patrick Riccards are both right and wrong in arguing that the march organizers don’t have specifics to carry an argument. It is true […]
Notes on tech-based teaching-tinkering
With considerable hyperbole floating around about the “transformative” or “disruptive” technologies possible in education, I’m going to record a few of the experiments I have tried in the past few years in my classes. ((I have not yet read Rick Hess’s paper, Quality Control in K-12 Digital Learning, and this is about my experiences teaching […]
I have a bad feeling about the economy
Not to go all Star Wars on you, (()) but the combination of the GDP revision downward for Q1 and the debt-ceiling mess is putting a real damper on my Friday. Our economy is stagnant, politicians are engaging in the contraction-is-expansion fantasy, and the consequences for the next decade are unpleasant. For the next year, […]
People’s lives are path-dependent, too
Earlier this month, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein reviewed the long-term impact of unemployment, and it's not pretty: apart from the immediate effects, there are long-term consequences for one's career, health, etc. None of this should be surprising, but it means that one of the consequences of the Lesser Depression* is a set of nasty cohort […]