New novel "Class" takes on education, parenting, and values

White guilt. White privilege. Support for liberal values and public education goes head-to-head with the competitive world of social class and egalitarianism in the new social satire Class by writer Lucinda Rosenfeld. This new novel joins the ranks of novels exploring the complicated world of "competitive parenting" amidst the public-private school dichotomy in New York City. I'm only a few chapters in at this point, but I am enjoying Rosenfeld's enthusiastic and insightful spotlight on the challenge of doing what's "best for our kids" while also holding political views and values that are often much easier to hold in the abstract than in practice.

For idealistic forty-something Karen Kipple, it isn't enough that she works full-time in the non-profit sector, aiding an organization that helps hungry children from disadvantaged homes. She's also determined to live her personal life in accordance with her ideals. This means sending her daughter, Ruby, to an integrated public school in their Brooklyn neighborhood.

But when a troubled student from a nearby housing project begins bullying children in Ruby's class, the distant social and economic issues Karen has always claimed to care about so passionately feel uncomfortably close to home. As the situation at school escalates, Karen can't help but wonder whether her do-gooder husband takes himself and his causes more seriously than her work and Ruby's wellbeing.

Jazz comes alive in Denver

Let's face it, La La Land was just an acknowledgment of what many in the arts community have known for at least a few years now - Jazz is as cool as it has ever been, and it's a great time to be a jazz fan. While the big cities on the coasts, and of course Chicago and New Orleans, have plenty of spots to see the big names as well as the up and comers playing great jazz daily, the heartland in the shadow of the Rockies is another jazz-centric locale as "Denver sits in on (another) rebirth of Jazz."

Once a pariah of youth culture, jazz is enjoying a resurgence with a hip slice of millennial fans and musicians near and far. As venues like Dazzle Jazz and the Meadowlark open their stages to informal jazz jam sessions every week, acts like BadBadNotGood and bassist Thundercat (who plays the Bluebird Theater next month) have leveraged their cross-generational appeal into top billing at rock rooms and massive music festivals. At Dazzle Jazz, the de facto epicenter of Denver’s jazz scene, that young blood runs backstage, too. The venue’s 23-year-old marketing manager,  Mike Zubrinic, works alongside its 25-year-old music director, Michael Schreier, who began booking the venue after completing his master’s degree in jazz studies from the University of Northern Colorado a little over a year ago. Schreier said Dazzle not only caters to an “increased appreciation for jazz in youth,” but thanks to its internet presence, might also be partially responsible for it. As is common practice for businesses on social media, Dazzle targets a young demographic in its online advertising for acts like The Bad Plus and Danny McCaslin, bands Schreier described as “rabbit holes” into the genre’s deep expanse.

Almost Anyone but Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education

We can certainly expect to be occasionally baffled, disappointed, and somewhat dismayed by many actions and decisions of the President-elect over the next four years - and it will be exhausting and fruitless to vociferously oppose and reject them all. However, the one that most educators, parents, and voters should be able to agree on is this:  Betsy DeVos should not be the Secretary of Education.

On two critically important areas of responsibility for the Secretary of Education — protecting the rights of all students, particularly the most vulnerable students, and on accountability — time after time Mrs. DeVos failed her test. She reflexively offered to devolve all decision-making to the states, even in the face of experience that shows this would lead to poor student outcomes and potentially more youth at risk and left behind.

To that end, I am encouraging people to contact their GOP reps and let them know we expect that they will reject the nomination of Betsy DeVos. This is not about political party nor about ideology. I would gladly support numerous "education reform voices" who would appeal to Republicans and who have the knowledge and experience to lead discussions and education policy. Some great voices could be people like Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute or Jay P. Greene of the University of Arkansas or Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. Or, how about former Colorado state Senator Michael Johnston? Senator Lamar Alexander would also be great. We could and should support people who have knowledge and experience with public education.

We should reject and oppose Betsy DeVos because she is, quite simply, clueless about education and education policy.

Are We Failing Our Boys? How can we truly "Man up"?

"The three most destructive words that every boy hears when he's young is when he's told to be a man."

As an educator and a father of a boy and girl, I am worried about our boys, our young men. The "mask of masculinity" which has effectively feminized basic human values such as empathy seems to be entrenched and gaining ground in contemporary American society. And it has led more than one parent I know to ask "What are we doing to help our boys?" From the way they talk to each other to the way they talk about females, the contemporary young "man" may well be in a state of crisis. And that issue is the source of an important and timely documentary called "The Mask You Live In," which is produced by the Representation Project.



"As a society, how are we failing our boys?"

Do You Believe in Magic

I love magic. And, what I love most about it is that I believe in magic. From the time I was a kid, I could watch magicians and illusionists and contortionists and the like for hours, and it never got boring. These days, it's an amazing time to be a fan of magic because there are people pushing the limits of belief and imagination like never before. The man at the top of the pyramid in my mind is the incredible Mr. David Blaine. Blaine showed up on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon recently, and with some seemingly simple card trips he blew the minds of Jimmy and the Roots. Of course, I was a little upset with myself when I ran across it because it led to an evening just watching David Blaine clips on YouTube.com. The coolest thing for me is the idea that David calls it magic but really just explains that he is committed to making the impossible possible. And that is just fine with me.

Trip to the Library

My reading is all over the place, which is really a reflection of my mind and interest level in general. Whenever I read a book review that is interesting, I'll request the book. Depending on the order they come in, that can make for some eclectic reading time. It's usually a blend of novels and non-fiction, and I am truly not a committed literature guy despite my role as an English teacher. And, of course, I occasionally pick up some featured books and "staff picks."  I probably finish about thirty percent of what I actually check out of the library or buy on Amazon. After a recent trip to the library and book store, here are the books on my shelf that I'm currently bouncing around with.

My pop culture fix is currently provided pop culture writer Gavin Edwards' entertaining and informative look at contemporary America's favorite trickster-god:  The Tao of Bill Murray: Real-life Stories of Joy, Enlightenment, and Party Crashing.

In YA lit land where I browse both as a teacher and a father of two adolescents, I ran across a compelling title for a Gen Xer English teacher. Author Barbara Shoup had me with the title Looking for Jack Kerouac.

And for the strangest of reasons I picked up another well known book from the Gen X-chic lit genre: Sophie Kinsella's original pop culture hit Confessions of a Shopaholic.

Give PSAT, not PARCC, at High School

Thankfully and rightfully, parents and students in Colorado are increasingly discerning about the standardized tests administered in school. Relevance is the key, and that's where long-standing college admission assessments like PSAT, SAT, & ACT are superior to the PARCC test. Fortunately, we have some clear-thinking legislators who are attuned to this issue and are taking action. Nancy Todd from Senate District 28 has introduced a bill this session that will give schools choice in the state-mandated test for ninth graders.

This legislative session Todd is introducing a bill that would give districts more flexibility when it comes to testing ninth graders. Currently, Colorado high school freshmen are required to take the PARCC test in English language arts and math, but Todd wants to give districts the option of offering the PSAT, ACT Aspire or an equivalent test in lieu of the CMAS assessment.

Kudos and gracious thanks to Senator Todd. She's a legislator and advocate for kids who truly gets it.

Best Albums of my Youth

As a Gen Xer coming of age in the 70s & 80s (and probably still growing up a bit in the 90s), I was definitely impacted by the music of the age. It's no surprise to anyone who knows me that I consider REM to be the greatest American rock band, and musically they could do almost no wrong by me. Of course, we all have those albums (records, cassettes, and CDs) that define us and transport us back in time. On Facebook, it appears to be a thing to list our Top Ten from adolescence. Ranking always bothers me, and lists are always too limiting. But here are ten albums that rocked my youth:

• REM - Life's Rich Pageant 
• VIOLENT FEMMES - Violent Femmes
• THE WHO - Who's Next
• THE CLASH - London Calling
• THE DOORS - Greatest Hits
• BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - Born in the USA
• THE POLICE - Zenyatta Mondata
• U2 - War (& Under a Blood Red Sky)
• SEX PISTOLS - Never Mind the Bollocks ...
• NIRVANA - Nevermind

Deplorables are always "bad," Mr. Weiss - You sadly miss the point

The "basket of deplorables" comment will live on in infamy, as it probably should. It truly does reflect the completely aloof way that HRC and the Democrats waged a misguided Presidential campaign and irresponsibly turned the White House and the country over to potentially the most pathetic and risky person to ever occupy the Oval Office. However, the bigger mistake may be the misunderstanding that so many Trump voters - enthusiastic and reluctant alike - asign to the statement. This equally aloof and misguided view is nowhere better exemplified than in the sad piece of commentary published in the Wall Street Journal recently by a carpet salesman in Pittsburgh named Lou Weiss who strangely believes "The Deplorables Aren't So Bad, Once You Get to Know Us."

Actually, Mr. Weiss, the "deplorable" people in American society who are racist, prejudiced, mysoginistic, aggressive, violent, insulting, and threatening are, in fact, "so bad." That is the nature of the word deplorable. Deplorable words and behavior should always be exposed, criticized, and opposed in a civil society, and supporting any of those words or actions or attitudes is deplorable in itself. Sadly, after reading your piece of commentary, I don't believe that defense of bigoty is what you are arguing. Even sadder is that I don't believe you understand what you are trying to argue. Obvioulsy, Trump supporters who are not racist or hateful are also not deplorable, and HRC's mistake was not in the use of the word deplorable, but in foolishly assigning it to "half of his supporters."

That said, your subsequent criticism of progressive Democrats as an explanation of non-"deplorable" people at Big 10 games or frequenting Chick-fil-A or "working on your leaky faucet" is the worst form of elitism, as it manages to misunderstand both Trump supporters and Trump critics. Your claims contribute to stereotypes and bias based on jobs, socioeconomic status, and region, and your argument implies that values and morals are inherently part of a demographic when they may not be. By seeking to criticize bias and misundertanding, you sadly reflect it. Many supporters of HRC and critics of Donald Trump also support Michigan football, and watch American Sniper, and work in skilled labor like plumbing or nursing or mechanics. How sadly aloof you are to those realities. Truly, even many Trump supporters who work in the trades or are well-off attorneys in gated communities opposed the "deplorable" behavior so visible at Trump rallies by supporters and the candidate alike. And don't kid yourself - some of those people in the jobs you mention and frequenting the places you describe are potentially quite deplorable. Jobs do not equate to character or values or morals. And believing so is simply another example of prejudice.

Unless you are the type of person who went to the rallies and screamed hateful racist and mysoginistic threats, you should not identify with being "deplorable" or ask people to "get to know us." In attempting to educate the hipsters and Hamilton fans about how wrong they are about deplorables, you've only furthered the division, complicated the issues, and embarrassed yourself.

Will Shoder, David Foster Wallace, & the End of Irony

Just because it was on You Tube, I ran across this really well done video on irony and post-modernism. It was put together by some guy named Will Shoder, who isn't on Twitter as far as I can tell, but does have this Patreon page which he uses to support his work.

Standardized Test Companies should end time limits

My ninth-grade son took a Practice-ACT last weekend, and he did exceptionally well, as I would have expected for an advanced learner who aced AP Calculus as an eighth-grader. However, the feedback he gave about the experience simply reinforced my long-standing criticism of the tests such as ACT, SAT, PSAT, and of testing companies like College Board, ETS, & Pearson. Simply put, the time constraints on kids in these tests are completely arbitrary and create an inauthentic view of a student's intellectual and academic abilities.

My son finished the hour-long math section in roughly fifteen minutes and achieved a perfect score. Math at that level takes him almost no time to process. On the other hand, he felt the unnecessary pressure of finishing the 35-minute Reading section. He still did incredibly well on that section, but the ACT Reading section is truly an abomination in the world of literacy. It requires students to read four passages and answer 40 questions (10/per) in 35 minutes. That means averaging roughly eight-and-a-half minutes per passage. That is not reading. That is not literacy. That is not predictive of any applicable skill or intelligence ... other than the ability to do that test.

In a more reasonable environment, my son would have and should have been able to apply the extra 45-minutes from math to the reading section. The reverse may be true for students who can quickly read and answer questions on passages, but may need more than an hour for math. And, really who cares how long it takes to finish the tasks. We all remember taking the tests and hearing the dreaded "Stop, put your pencils down. You may not go back to that section or go forward to other sections." And, seriously, why not? Testing environments should allow the student the freedom to simply work on the whole test at their own pace and leisure.

As a coordinator for tests and testing accommodations, I am quite familiar with students who receive "extended time" on tests. They are required to apply for this privilege, and they must have some extensive documentation about a diagnosed "processing speed" disability or impairment to qualify. But there is no legitimate reason that all kids shouldn't be given extended time. If a kid finishes the tasks in one hour or seven, what's the difference if they can both solve the problems, exhibit the skills and knowledge, and accomplish the tasks.

Free the students. End ridiculous time constraints on standardized tests.

Writer-Mom "Experiments" with LSD

Well, this is certainly one of the weirder stories I've heard in a while. Even stanger, it's not just a story. Author Michael's Chabon's wife, Ayelet Waldman, has published a new memoir called A Really Good Day: How Microdosing made a Megadifference in my Mood, Marriage, and Life. Microdosing? That's a word? And a thing?

Ayelet Waldman would like you to know that she’s just a regular mom. Like you, she lives in her yoga pants, Instagrams her indulgent desserts, bickers with her husband and (four!) children: “I’m the woman standing behind you in Starbucks ordering the skinny vanilla latte, the one getting a mammogram in the room next to yours, the one digging through her too-full purse looking for her keys while you wait impatiently for her parking spot,” she writes in “A Really Good Day.”  But Waldman the everywoman is also Waldman the outlaw. She has not only taken LSD but has also written a book about it. “A Really Good Day” is a chronicle of her one-month search for emotional balance by taking small doses of a drug most people associate with Timothy Leary or CIA experiments [or hippies at a Dead concert or millenials dancing at raves of a Phish concert].

I'm not quite sure how to feel about this idea and story other than to say it makes me ... uneasy.

GOP's "State Lines" Claim on Insurance Prices is Flawed

As the country braces for controversial changes to a controversial health care law, many American families are deeply concerned about the GOP making things worse and losing gains that have been made. Obviously, lowering health care costs is the primary and very necessary goal, and the "Affordable Care Act" has for the most part failed to accomplish that goal. And, there is simply no legitimate reason that health care and health insurance has to be so expensive - especially in a time of somewhat ridiculous revenue and profits for the health care industry. That said, the standard GOP call for "market reforms" and "consumer freedom" seem like rather naive and ambiguous plans and policies to alleviate the problems. I'm not going to disagree that "fixing health care requires the repeal of Obamacare," as argued by three Colorado congressmen.

And speaking of replacement plans, the narrative that Republicans have offered no plan to replace Obamacare is false. Republicans have introduced multiple alternative health care plans since 2010, and we encourage you to review them. The most recent replacement plan was offered by the Republican Study Committee, called the American Health Care Reform Act. The Empowering Patients First Act was a plan put forth in the 114th Congress by future Health and Human Services Secretary, Dr. Tom Price. Our Better Way Agenda also includes a blueprint for replacing Obamacare that is centered on more choices, lowers costs, and greater flexibility.

However, many of the claims and counterarguments and proposals by the GOP are simply ideological positions that have no proven benefit, and potentially troublesome effects. The biggest myth of GOP health care reform is the argument that allowing the purchase of policies across state lines will lower health care costs. Insurance prices are market-based, and companies will simply not sell a low-cost market policy to a higher cost market consumer. That's such basic business and economic knowledge that I wonder how GOP politicians and policy writers can continue to claim otherwise with a straight face. They are either ideologically naive, or they are simply lying. The question voters have failed to ask is why. As Bruce Japsen explains for Forbes magazine, "Selling Insurance Across State Lines Won't Lower Costs."

“Currently individual states can decide whether or not to allow insurers to sell plans from another state in their state,” the Center for Health & Economy wrote about Trump’s health plan earlier this year. “However, even where this is allowed, various barriers such as the difficulty of building a network and attracting enough customers to create a large enough risk pool make it unappealing to insurers to pursue this option.”

Is the 401K Retirement a Lie?

I've been thinking about retirement lately as I approach the mid-century mark, and like too many members of Generation X who were hit hard by several downturns and recessions, I don't have a grand plan for reitirement income. As an educator who pays into a state pension, I will never draw from Social Security, and I have to hope that legislators in Colorado and Illinois do not gut the defined benefit plans I have paid into. The story of the "vanishing pension" plans has been the story of a generation that may not have the comfortable golden years that the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers have enjoyed. A solution to the problem of weak or disappearing pensions and the unstable future of Social Security was the rise of the brilliant 401k plan that promised to allow people to control more of their own money and grow their own nest eggs. Sadly, it may all be based on false promises and naive ideological thinking. That's the warning from Bloomberg's Meghan McCardle who writes this week about "The 401K Problem We Refuse to Solve."

Was the 401(k) a tragic mistake? “The great lie is that the 401(k) was capable of replacing the old system of pensions,” former American Society of Pension Actuaries head Gerald Facciani told the Journal. “It was oversold." This is true. On the other hand, so was Social Security oversold. As was that good ol' defined benefit pension, so beloved of editorial writers, which was available to only a minority of workers when the 401(k) sprang into being. Nor were those pensions necessarily the generous perpetual incomes of popular imagining; autoworkers and public-sector employees got a great deal, but most people were not working for either the government or General Motors. They got smaller pensions -- sometimes much smaller, if their companies failed and dumped the pensions onto the government’s pension insurer.

Yes, We Can.

Maggie Smith's Poem & the Loss of Innocence

It's not so often that poetry and poets make national news or even create a buzz among the non-literary population across the forums of social media. But 2016 was the type of year that could stir many in middle America to read, respond to, and promote a poem that captured a moment and articulated the emotions and confusion that are too often impossible to describe. National tragedies and tragedies of the human spirit are becoming all too common, and events like the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando scream for someone to explain and clarify and offer an avenue for healing. And so it was that poet Maggie Smith "sat in a Starbucks and wrote a poem" that begins with the resigned melancholic observation "Life is short, though I keep this from my children." It became, in the words of Washington Post writer Nora Krug, "A Poem that Captured the Mood of 2016."

The poem is a heartfelt work that grapples with pain and injustice, with unfairness and disillusionment. “The world is at least/ fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative/ estimate,” it says. “For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird./ For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,/ sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world/ is at least half terrible, and for every kind/ stranger, there is one who would break you.”Its subject is whether, when and how to talk to children about these hard realities. “I was troubled by the question of how we teach our kids about the world without lying to them — telling them that it’s all good — and telling them the truth without scaring them.” In the poem, the speaker takes on the role of a real estate agent: “I am trying/ to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,/ walking you through a real s***hole, chirps on/ about good bones: This place could be beautiful,/ right? You could make this place beautiful.”

Poetry is a bit of a conundrum for many, but often it rings true and clarifies, and that's the case with the full poem "Good Bones," which grapples with the delicate question of how we protect our children from the harsh realities of the world without hiding it to their detriment. It's a parenting question I first addressed here, and which many a critic has struggled to clarify. Neil Postman warned us that the increasingly technological and interconnected world we seek and have casually cultivated will ultimately lead to The Disappearance of Childhood, a societal invention that should be more cherished.

Minimalism: a Documentary

Tiny houses and tidying up - these two phenomena of sorts seem to be an apt reflection for a time and place where people are feeling underwhelmed and overwhelmed by the very same lives. In perhaps the most materialist and consumer-oriented time in history, there remains among many middle class dwellers a feeling of emptiness and a desire to get away from it all. "Simplify, simplify, simplify," advised Henry David Thorea way back in the 1830s in rural New England. Can you even imagine what he'd make of 2016.

So, ironically, there are many products and presentations and even apps that are available to help contemporary Americans in their quest to simplify their lives. One addition I recently encountered is a podcast and documentary from a couple of guys who call themselves "The Minimalists." Josh Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus are attempting to help people live more with less. Take a look at their documentary trailer:



So, if you're feeling a like "The World is Too Much with Us," you may want to consider focusing on downsizing your life. And, while you're here, take a look and listen to this beautiful piece by REM that came on while I was posting this blog entry:

The Whimsical Brilliance of the Geography of Genius

It was amusingly in an airport bookstore that I ran across Eric Weiner's engaging book The Geography of Genius. One of the perks of travel - of going new places - is the chance to encounter something unexpected and open up a new pathway to knowledge, insight, even bliss. Weiner's book is about his "search for the world's most creative places, from ancient Athens to Silicon Valley," and he operates from the idea that there are special qualities or factors that led a surge of creative thinking and genius resulting in a "renaissance." It's a good question - why does a renaissance happen with the seemingly fortuitious congregation of great minds and achievements in small locales at specific places in time?

Eric Weiner has the gift of engaging storytelling as his hook, and he has the sharp mind of an astute researcher who can ask the right questions, engage the right people, and spot or synthesize the right trends. Those are the keys to successful educators - which he clearly is - and "ideas gurus" whose writing has become a sub-genre of the non-fiction world. What I enjoyed most about this book are the names and connections that inspire me to seek more information. While we all know a bit about Socrates and the basics of Greek philosophy (or at least about Athens as the epicenter of philosophy and democracy), Weiner's descriptions of the factors and relationships lead a reader to want to know more - to deepen and synthesize our knowledge and understanding of these great men. The chapter on Edinburgh offers a thoughtful introduction to one of the great Age of Reason writers and thinkers that far too many people don't know about - David Hume. It was the Hume story - and all the little connections my mind made to other ideas I knew or wanted to know - which convinced me this book was a keeper. It would be one to go on the shelf as a resource when I was looking for something or someone new to learn about. And it would hopefully inspire my own creativity and my little personal renaissance from time to time.

The insight of this book is best summed up by Weiner in the words of Socrates - "What is honored in a country will be cultivated there." Throughout Weiner's travels - and that's the best part of the book: he visits the places and gets down and dirty with the locals - Weiner identifies various keys to geographical creative flourishes. By visiting the countries/cities/regions of Athens, Hangzhou, Florence, Edinburgh, Calcutta, Vienna, and Silicon Valley, he is able to identify how the chaotic nature of one place or the collaborative quality of another cultivated genius. These places tend to host little hotbeds of discussion or dissent in cafes, botegas, coffeehouses, symposiums, libraries, addas, and more. The places within the places are often the true secret to a renaissance. And in describing who hangs out in these places mulling their ideas, Weiner's book has the added benefit of introducing readers to even more examples of true genuises than they thought they knew - from Thucydides to Hewlett & Packard.

The final insight is a fun one - he places his quest against the one place we know best - our homes - and he encourages all of us to take the lessons of geographical genius and try to cultivate them in our own geography.

Look to Neil Postman and warnings of "Future Schlock"

When I am wondering what I think about something, I generally know I can look to a few contemporary philosophers and social critics to put events in perspective .... even if their conclusions make me a bit dizzy. So, lately I've been looking back over a collection of essays called Conscientious Objections by humanities professor and writer Neil Postman. The subtitle of the work is "Stirring up Trouble about Language, Technology, and Education." Published in 1988, the collection of essays are eerily prescient about the languishing of culture and education at the expense of a convenience-oriented, entertainment-focused, technology-driven society. Two essays in particular - "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and "Future Schlock" - point to the rising tide of anti-intellectualism and distraction which seems so prevalent in a society that is by all accounts living in what should be the "most informed" time in the history of man. Yet, man's "appetite for distraction" is large, and his inclination for over-simplified thinking is equally vast. Postman contextualizes his concerns with references to the seemingly unlikely rise of fascism prior to World War II, and he frames that historical reality with the lessons of two brilliant pieces of pop culture and social satire: The Gods Must be Crazy and Mel Brooks' The Producers.

Me and Bruce - Born to Run in 2016

Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA changed my life and rocked my world as a fourteen-year-old boy growing up in small town southern, Illinois in the early 80s. It would become an anthem for a generation, and while I was undoubtedly a rock-n-roll fan by then, Bruce's songs and stories opened up a whole new world in terms of understanding angst amidst the American Dream. The raw honesty of the story-telling and the rugged power of a rock guitar made sense to me, and the boxed set of the E Street Band I received for my birthday a year later was an early chapter in my American education. Now, as I sit comfortably in middle age, celebrating a slow march nearing the age of fifty, the Boss has once again graced my coming-of-age with a manifesto of "Growing Up."

So, here I am at the beginning of 2017, reflecting on the past and the dawn of "another year" in front of me. And as I glance back at the past two January 2 posts, I am wondering if this is the year that I just "get on with it" and take a few more steps toward living the life I have imagined. I haven't established the more comprehensive "A Teacher's View" website yet, and I haven't made any progress with the more scholarly writing that I have been planning. And, of course I am certainly not David Brooks or Malcom Gladwell in any professional sense. That said, I did manage to finally complete and publish an up-dated version of my critical work of Douglas Coupland, McJob: Life and Culture in Douglas Coupland's Early Novels, and I think it's even sold a few copies at this point. There will hopefully be some more extensive Generation X writing in the near future, and I hope to increase my academic output with a few more pieces of cultural criticism, and maybe even a conference paper or two.

We'll see. Hoping 2017 and the age of 47 is my "best year yet."

2016 - A Year in Review

"When looking back on the 365 days of 2016 most people will think ... WHAT THE HELL?"

The best and most hilarious part of welcoming a New Year is reading the brilliant Dave Barry's review of the last one.

Dave Barry Year in Review 2016: Trump and the Hideous Monstrosity that was 2016

Some New Year's Thoughts from Great Minds

On New Year's Day 2017, I took a long walk through the neighborhood, and that might be the best way to begin any new beginning - by taking a walk. That bit of insight is not mine, but from America's original original, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was a proponent of walking:

No one has made a more compelling case for the bodily and spiritual value of walking — that basic, infinitely rewarding, yet presently endangered human activity — than Henry David Thoreau. In his 1861 treatise Walking, penned seven years after Walden, Thoreau reminds us of how that primal act of mobility connects us with our essential wildness, that spring of spiritual vitality methodically dried up by our sedentary civilization. He makes a special point of differentiating the art of sauntering from the mere act of walking:

This Thoreau-ian insight was collected for us by one of the premier "ideas bloggers" out there, Maria Popova, whose Brainpickings site is one of the best collections of literary and philosophical tidbits found anywhere on the web. Popova is a consumate reader and writer who posts regularly about information that is just too wonderful to keep to herself. For New Year's Day, she collected "fifteen such higher-order resolutions for personal refinement."