Browse Topics
Education
On Writing
Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk.
July 1988A History Of The World
One of the fringe benefits of being an English or history teacher is receiving the occasional jewel of a student blooper in an essay. I have pasted together the following “history” of the world from certifiably genuine student bloopers collected by teachers throughout the United States, from eighth grade through college level. Read carefully, and you will learn a lot.
July 1987Daylight Savings
Orson has stopped asking me to marry him, but every once in a while he says something to let me know that the offer still stands.
May 1987Gold And Black
Then he turns to me, and direct as an arrow says, “You gonna be there?” (This, I thought, is what they refer to in books as “the moment of truth.”) My heart was creeping up my esophagus like an inchworm; but my tongue would not unwind.
October 1986My Biggest Mistake
Not listening to my heart; believing my mother when she said, “Play dumb. Boys don’t marry smart girls.”; not dancing with Nan Zuckerman at the Sixth Grade Prom
February 1986Broken Bond
An Interview With Joseph Chilton Pearce
If the majority of our children stopped producing twelve-year molars, we’d be in shock; yet they’ve stopped producing twelve-year mentality. Operational thinking fails to take place in seventy percent of our children, and no one pays that much attention. Instead, we do what we are doing to our children earlier and do more of it. We put them in school earlier and earlier, and keep them in school longer and longer.
August 1985Scott and Helen Nearing: A Tribute
Self-reliance has been linked with democracy in the American mind since Thomas Jefferson extolled the small farmer as the cornerstone of a free society. Thoreau sang of similar values. In our day, Scott and Helen Nearing have epitomized the best of that tradition.
July 1984
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today