Like a lot of writing teachers, I use Anita Garland’s essay, “Let’s Really Reform Our Schools” in my class. I like it because while it proposes something no on can argue with– better schools– it does so in a way that is rhetorically quite dubious. It’s basically a Fox News kind of argument, in which one group– “we”– is pitched against another: the “they” or “them.”

Even worse, the “we” or “us” is a very vague group of people “who only want the best for our children” (who wouldn’t want to be a part of that group?) and the “they” are both the so-called trouble makers (students who don’t want to be in school) and teachers, administrators, and policy makers…

I work online, and I think online writing classes work at least as well as face to face teaching. I love technology and gadgets too, even though they are too often tainted by consumerism. I am not certain of the source, but someone left this Douglas Adams quote as a comment on my site recently:

First we thought the PC was a calculator.  Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII – and we thought it was a typewriter.  Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television.  With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.

I went on short trip last weekend to Meramec Caverns– my GPS is the greatest thing since sliced bread on these trips–and I was struck, once again, by the image of people waving their cell phones around in the air, trying to get what we euphemistically call “service.”

I understand the impulse. The motel and the campground that surrounds the…

I lived overseas just long to realize that I had to either come home or accept a kind of permanent status as an expatriate. I didn’t come home because I loved my country, though, I came home because I missed and loved my culture. I’ve never been a patriot, because, as the cliché says, it’s the last refuge of scoundrels.

A so-called “love” for a nation is more than a little creepy, and I can’t see much difference between a false patriotism and an authentic patriotism. There’s something inherently false about loving something as abstract and intangible as a nation. How can a nation be an object of love? It can’t.

What people really love is their culture in…

I have an Uncle who, to be polite, I consider an accurate barometer of ‘Big Lie’ conservative politics. If the right wing radio demagogues start a ‘Big Lie’ strategy, you can be sure my Uncle will soon repeat it. At one level, I want to believe that this is less a reflection of his honesty and more a reflection of the less than serious nature of his political thinking. It’s not really political rhetoric at all.

He’s not really trying to lie, in other words, he’s just treating politics as a kind of professional sport, and he’s talking trash about the opposition. It’s “sports rhetoric.” I have to say, though, that if it is true that he treats…

A long time ago (well, not really so long at all) leftists loved to use the language of the old communism as a kind of shock rhetoric. Most of us in the progressive community weren’t really working class or proletarian any more, with certain exceptions, but we just loved that Marxist vocabulary. I still love the word proletarian and I love the art that the feeling it represented often inspired.

I don’t think of things in such severe binary opposites anymore, although I do still believe that the tension (dialectic) between capital and labor is the driving force behind any capitalist economy, including command economies like China. In just about every important way I am middle class. Yet,…

When I was a kid and I tried to get one of my three sisters’ in trouble, usually by complaining about something that I had just done myself, my mom would always say, “That’s the pot calling the kettle black!” I have to say that whenever I read about the for profit education industry, where I work, that’s my first reaction each time. Pot, meet kettle.

I shouldn’t complain about investigative journalism, of course, and a piece like, “On For-Profit College Boards, Knowledgeable Insiders” ought to help to keep management and the administration honest. Sunshine, as the cliche goes, is the best disinfectant. On the other hand, the tone of the piece is a little too breathless…