These days, some people view holiday shopping as a sport or game: collecting the best coupons, sussing out the best deals, beating the crowds, picking the right stores at the right time, suriving the long lines without having to use the bathroom… It takes physical and mental strength, right? If shopping is your game, this […]
By the time 1997 hit October, I had already started calling it the Year from Hell. I had graduated from Fordham and already found myself foundering professionally. I had compiled a jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none resume that left me unsure of what field to pursue and without the confidence to sell myself in interviews. I was about to […]
There are a lot of angles to the Penn State case, but one thing that keeps coming into my head is how almost no one saw this particular ending coming. I wonder, did Joe Paterno, at any point in the last decade, think about what his final game as head coach of Penn State would […]
Couple of quick notes while I try to de-sludge my brain and the rest of my body from this cold: Remember that last city council spot I mentioned in yesterday’s piece about the election day turnout? We’re still waiting for a couple of precincts to report, but right now the margin between the guy who […]
Election Day in Philadelphia came with pretty sparse turnout on a beautiful day. I was home sick from work, which kind of made me miss the days when my house was the polling place. On the other hand, I didn’t have to clean my garage. On the one hand the sparse turnout is no surprise, […]
OK, so maybe I’m a little sensitive since I just wrote my piece on why the Occupy movement needs an electoral strategy. (And yeah, Occupy a Voting Booth does not really appear to be a unique title on my part, but sometimes the obvious choices are good ones.) But this piece in the Philadelphia Daily […]
Zac Chase of Autodizactic.com fame has been asking people to share their thoughts on the purpose of school. It’s one of those things I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and right now it seems like a task I can focus on. I think school as an institution has two purposes, and sometimes they […]
I’ve been shopping for a new computer for a while, so I’ve been reading a lot of tech sites. Even still, it took a while for information about Thailand to penetrate my consciousness. The country is experiencing an extremely significant amount of flooding, which has shut down many of its factories. The humanitarian disaster is […]
Some of the big news in Philadelphia education this week is the unveiling of the latest draft of a Facilities Master Plan to close some schools and reconfigure others in order to deal with population changes and the departure of many Philadelphia public school students to charter schools. The proposal would close nine schools over […]
We spent some time thinking about free will and determinism in my ethics class, and watched a couple of movies that hinge on the idea. To wrap up the topic, I gave the students the following assignment today: Imagine that you are a lawyer in a court case involving one of the films we watched […]