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Showing posts from March, 2012

"It's Just Restin'..."

There is a quite famous Monty Python bit called "The Parrot Sketch." A John Cleese character enters a pet shop and confronts the clerk, played by Michael Palin, with a complaint. The parrot he'd bought from the shop not long before was dead. The Palin character is in complete denial about this, insisting that that it was "just restin'." The Cleese character must go to great lengths to demonstrate that indeed, the parrot is dead. I think about this sketch whenever I see virtually every single World inhabitant completely oblivious to the truths about the way their beloved World works, even in the most vitriolic censure of that World. I would otherwise dismiss such behavior as the typical way of those inhabitants -- it is what they do, they are hopelessly blind, they refuse to be made to see -- all the rest of it. What gets me is that so many of them claim to be or try to comport themselves as good wholesome Christians. I just shake my head. Today the...

Who Is The Real Warlord?

This morning before school started, a student came into my classroom with an urgent request. She asked me to watch a 30-minute YouTube video about a warlord in Uganda who is involved in child trafficking. She said his name was Joseph Kony, and she mentioned that she really understood the stuff we'd been discussing in class about food being used as a weapon in places like Africa. I was honored to hear of an instance when my students are actually taking to heart the things they are learning in my classroom. I promised her I'd take a peek at it later. What was funny was that another student in a class during the day mentioned that he'd heard something about this "Joseph Kony" thing, and wondered what it was about. I'd thought about my visit with the student this morning, and wondered what kind of crusade this may be turning into. After classes were over and my student conferences were over, I pulled it up to watch. It is a slickly made but poorly arranged ...

The Unrighteousness Project

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There are a dozen things I've jotted down to blog about to introduce my latest home page writing , and maybe I'll get to them sometime this month, time permitting. But I simply cannot fail to mention yet another ludicrously foolish attempt to make the world ever-so wonderful. As an AP teacher I'm in an email forum, and often I get a good feel for what some of these teachers are thinking. All of it perfectly rational, some of it horrifically unrighteous. One guy fancies himself quite the muckraker, and while he does expose some solid things about the benighted ways of the World, most of his offered solutions are those typical silly proposals that contain some spectacular merit but a lot of blatant stupidity. Here is the one that just put me away, and you should be able to find the idiocy in and around the noble intentions. So that's it! All we have to do is just get our connectedness with technology and science jussst right, and get rid of all that ugly finance a...