Following up on last night’s post, I was talking to a college friend who’s now a library teacher for young students, who are used to being able to type a question into Google and having a website pop up with an answer. (Not necessarily a good answer, but an answer.) It got me thinking about […]
My students have to find an article about “how the world has changed since 9/11/01” and bring it in tomorrow. It’s meant, in part, to be a way to break free of the idea that I have to curate every experience, but I admit I have a little trepidation. I mean, there’s a lot of […]
I’ve been trying to find a good way to help my ethics students learn about John Stuart Mill and utilitarianism. I put together this combination of reading and reflection questions to get everyone to think through the content, and every so often while the students are working independently we’ll stop and have a class discussion […]
Had my sister and her boyfriend over today for pizza and a game of Ticket to Ride. Once again we relied on Alton Brown’s dough recipe from his grilled pizza episode, although we made the pizza in the oven. Nearly killed my mixer making a double batch of dough because I forgot to use the […]
I was working on a writeup of the ethics class I’m teaching, but then I started to wonder if that was a productive topic. Before I could make up my mind I found myself looking through some material by Zac Chase, currently doing graduate work in education at Harvard. I met Zac at a session […]
I am slightly bummed that I did not get to see The National when they performed in Philadelphia this week. But given that it’s the first week of school and we’ve had some wacky weather here in the city, I’d probably be re-enacting the song “Conversation 16” if I had tried to go to an […]
I almost feel bad for the Atlanta Braves. Right now they have an 84-60 record for a .583 winning percentage. They’d be leading three of baseball’s six divisions with that record and be tied in the loss column for the lead in a fourth. But since the Phillies are having an insanely successful year, the […]
In the ethics class I’m teaching, I’m trying to set up the idea that sometimes we have to make choices that will lead to the least-bad outcome. Such choices are where our values really get tested, because there’s no easy or safe choice. To think through the problem, I modified an exercise given to me […]
Read this story by Jayson Stark about how detailed scouting information on hitters in baseball is stored, analyzed, and disseminated. It’s a great piece of writing that dives into one of the big reasons that scoring in baseball is down. Teams now know so much about individual hitters’ tendencies that they can craft a specific […]
New school year starts in earnest tomorrow. I find myself very anxious right now, so much so that I’m finding it hard to focus on what I’m trying to write. I’m looking over my course syllabi, and feeling frustrated that they read more like a software End User License Agreement than the first step of […]