A permanent present – what a haunting phrase. How bizarre and surreal it must be to serve a life sentence in the prison of the moment, trapped forever in the perpetual now, a world without end, a time without later.  — Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, p. 14 Call me crazy, but I couldn’t help [...]

So ends the Web Legacies series (see links to entire series at bottom). It’s been an interesting experience, taking those five-year-old education class essays and publishing them to you instead of just my professor.  I’m going to reflect a bit here, then list the entire series, with links, for a one-stop post for anybody who [...]

Last week, I mentioned reading Jeff Wasserman’s post about how schools teach bad writing (the 5-Paragraph Essay and other abominations). I mentioned how it made me “want to make my AP Lit class Ning public. We’re having forum discussions about Organic Form v. Mechanical.” The more I thought about atomizing those Ning walls and welcoming [...]

I’ve been up all night catching up on my reading, which these days means feed-reading, more than anything. Two that struck a chord: 1. That LearnerBlogosphere Idea Sylvia Martinez on the red-hot GenYES blog writes several posts about getting teens to use Web 2.0 independently – like we adult edubloggers do – to develop their [...]

Way past bedtime, but it’s Chusok – Korean Thanksgiving holiday – and I have the week off. And I want to share this link to the prototype of the Project Global Cooling website, which we’ll migrate to its own URL next week, and permanently open up to global, student-created content for annual contributions. I share [...]

We’re reading King Lear in AP Literature. Lear’s Fool breaks taboos and speaks inconvenient truths to power left and right. We talked about how today’s thinking comedians are “fools to Democracy,” since Kings no longer exist. The rub came when I wanted to give a taste of informed “foolery” to my 17-year-olds. They’re too busy [...]

Prison Exercise Yard: Photo by Jon’s pics Student: “Ms. Stucco says I have to quit Project Global Cooling to go to the Class Council Representative meetings every week.” Me: “And you explained to her you’d been volunteering on this project all summer, that you’re an important player in it, and that it’s community service in [...]

“For Zeus the Helmsman laid it down as law,that we must suffer,suffer,suffer,into Truth. –Aeschylus, The Oresteia “Imprisonment of the Mind” by ccr_358 on Flickr. The first half of this post is written in the (very real) voice of an angry student wanting to “quit school.” The second half is a preview of an upcoming podcast [...]

“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”–Leonardo da Vinci* St. Sebastian, c. 1480 *This quote comes from my “Quote – a – Day” widget.

A pleasant update or two, and more convergences. Six days ago I acted on a whim to try to make more international connections. I saw subscribers in my SiteMeter’s daily stats from Russia, Belgium, and Turkey, and posted a friendly “shout-out” asking them to introduce themselves. That two minutes of effort was so worth it. [...]