Dana Goldstein is one of my favorite policy and political writers working today, and this response to the recent  n+1 piece on unschooling is a good example of why. Goldstein is fair, measured, and diligent with her citations, while at the same time quite critical in her effect. It’s a great piece. (Astra Taylor’s piece […]
Continue reading →“I do indeed say that writing is artificial, and maybe one of our divergences is due to my not having explained that I do not consider being artificial necessarily bad at all, but rather of itself good. Nothing is more human than artifice. Only human beings can make products that are truly artificial–extensions into the […]
Continue reading →As someone who reads and writes a lot about American education policy, I often hear people assert that Montessori education is the secret weapon we could deploy to solve many of our problems. The people who say this are all well-meaning, and they are typically speaking out of personal experience, with a child of theirs […]
Continue reading →A piece I wrote about international students at American universities has been published at the Huffington Post. It’s worth saying that I wrote this piece before both this story in the New York Times and the horribly bigoted Pete Hoekstra Super Bowl ad came out. Were I to write the piece now, it would likely […]
Continue reading →My brother, inspired by Kat Asharya, has written a Valentine to the Virginia Woolf novel Jacob’s Room. It is a good idea, and bears repeating. So: how do I love thee, The Westing Game? I suppose I’m guilty of lapsing into self-parody when I say that the dominant impression of the book, for me, is […]
Continue reading →At this point, I find it hard to imagine a more incongruous marriage of strength and weakness than the cross-Google combination of power and versatility with perpetual annoyance and technological fussiness. This isn’t an argument about Google’s recent missteps re: privacy and user rights. That’s a separate issue. It’s just a whinge about the fact […]
Continue reading →Woodrow Wilson’s speech asking Congress to declare war against imperial Germany and bring the United States into World War One is, in many ways, a remarkable document. I’ve taken several classes of freshman composition students through a rhetorical analysis of the speech, and though at times it’s a slog, I find it a very generative […]
Continue reading →I’m sure you’ve had the conversation, at some point in your life, where you’ve discussed the fact that some words have prefixes or suffixes that indicate an antonym, but no antonym exists. For example, we say someone or some act is uncouth, but not couth; our hair can be unkempt, but not kempt; you can […]
Continue reading →You can fairly accuse me of being absurdly quotidian here. And that’s okay! You’ve been warned. So, I take attendance. It’s just necessary for a writing class, in the age of the process model. If you don’t establish the importance of attending class, and lay out clear negative consequences for missing a lot of class, […]
Continue reading →I was asked to write a piece on Obama’s recent tuition proposal for Consider Magazine, and was happy to provide one. You can check it out here. The format of the magazine is point-counterpoint, which requires a certain degree of tunnel vision. Also, the word count limit was a constraint. I will just add this: […]
Continue reading →