(This post is dedicated to the aspiring writers out there.) Today, January 1, 2009, is the second birthday of Beyond School. What a short, strange trip it’s been. I’m not superstitious, but I love coincidences, synchronicities, and patterns as much as the next guy. So I’m going to trace those two years up to an [...]

(A response to Morgante Pell’s “Slow Blogging in Fast Times.”) “Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.” –Ben Hecht Nice post. I’m sympathetic to the thrust, but would argue it’s not the length of [...]

More Winter cleaning. I’m going to be posting a lot of scholarly essays from my college years on these pages so I can toss the paper copies. Paper’s a bear to box and ship when you live the global vagabond’s life. I took a Greek tragedy and comedy class in college. We studied, among other [...]

Before I turn this post over to a new 21-year-old voice I find worth listening to, a bit of background: He followed me on Twitter. I went to his Twitter page to check him out, followed its link to his blog, skimmed it to get a sense of this guy. Mostly short posts, random-seeming. The [...]

I’ve been meaning to scratch this itch of a digitized reading/writing/speaking unit for any school with basic podcasting gear for a while, but have been too busy. Busy with a new job, here in Seoul, writing and announcing radio news. I applied for it a good two months ago, and after a glacial hiring process, [...]

8 a.m. Sunday morning in Onyang, where Chosun era kings bathed in the local hot springs to cure themselves of all sorts of maladies, and I hope in a few minutes to do the same. (It ain’t all that great a place now, by the way, with its ugly commercial strips and other modern blights.) [...]

Fellow Army vet and English teacher Jan Seiter and I had a dialogue on a comment thread that I want to share on this post. It will mostly be of interest to English and history teachers, I think. I hope some of you weigh in. In the meantime, it gave me an opportunity to list [...]

Last week, Wikispaces invited me to give a Wikispaces in Education Webinar about four wiki projects I’ve done in high school English and history classes: The Broken World Wiki Textbook, a student-made textbook of modern world history from WW1 to WW2, featuring text, images, and embedded videos and student video lectures (and linked to a [...]

[This post had major problems in its original draft. I heavily edited it for all you stumblers. Later posts in the "Unsucky Gilgamesh" series: 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and [...]

In my perfect America, the evangelical radio stations choking out the dial are spreading the gospel of Science, not that of a religion of the downtrodden classes of the Roman Empire.  Yes, science has its dark side, but so do the evangelicals’ “gods.”  In my book, churches and laboratories are close to tied on the [...]