On Being a Teacher

Fundamentally, I am a teacher. That entails my acquiring knowledge from many sources and dispensing that disparate knowledge in coherent ways to unformed minds. Teachers make contributions to society only indirectly. We don’t directly build bridges, create new technologies, or provide landscaping services. We don’t heal people using pharmaceuticals, nor do we judge legal cases, […]

What’s with the new fad of claiming one is a Digital Creator? What are they creating, apart from a persona? What does it even mean? At first, I thought it sounded kind of unique: “What do you for a living?” “Oh, I’m a Digital Creator. . .” “A what?!” But I’ve begun to notice that […]

I picked up a really great book at my local Barnes & Noble this week. In fact, I also picked up an equally great book at the same Barnes & Noble the week before. But this journal entry is not about the books. It’s about something strange I noticed. In fact, I have been going […]

“It is possible that we have adapted ourselves to disinformation, to Newspeak, to public-relations hype, to imagery disguised as thought, to picture newspapers and magazines, to religion revealed in the form of entertainment, to politics in the form of a thirty-second television commercial.” – Neil Postman It was from Neil Postman that I first learned […]

A few months ago, I found myself in a Chipotle restaurant. This was in the winter. It was around 9:00 PM when I was finished eating and I was ready to leave. It was dark outside. I had parked my car in a side parking lot that had no lighting at all, so it was […]

I’ve often been transfixed by the sports of boxing and wrestling, as well as by the martial arts. I myself joined a boxing club early in life, studied professional boxing throughout the 1970s and 80s, and kept tabs on the sport. In Junior High and High School I competed on the wrestling team, wrestled in […]

People do the wrong thing on occasion. Sometimes the “wrong thing” means they hurt or betray or otherwise disappoint someone. I’m not talking about cases in which the person on the receiving end of the slight is hypersensitive or thin-skinned. I’m talking about actual, unarguable wrong-doing where Person A made commitments to Person B, and […]