Every American school child knows or should know about the Salem witch trials, and part of that chapter of American history involves torture. Perhaps we should not torture our own citizens that overtly, but events as they transpired a few hundred years ago certainly represent American ingenuity so that an early form of water torture,…
Unfortunately, online education, or its include-all moniker “online,” tends to be lined up against face-to-face or classroom instruction, as if the two were gunfighters. Even if in the minds of some one of the parties walks away the victor, that party has more than the usual shoulder or arm wound than that of the winner…
In a commentary published yesterday by The Chronicle of Higher Education, an English professor at Utah State under a headline with lack of logic (English professors should know better, I can say that, I am an English professor), “Guns on Campus Have Already Curtailed Free Speech,” blames the right to bear arms on “feminist and…
In the spirit of Halloween, mischief its obligatory companion, it is only suitable to note the labyrinthine ways of parking instructions on college campuses all across America. In honor of one of the colleges from which I graduated, I will use it as an exemplar. I am certain many of you have your own spooky…
It is not the toothless grin of the jack-o’-lantern, a name that will give even the most fastidious punctuators among us a shiver with its strange hyphen and accent mark combination, that scares me. Nor is it the light of a candle that illuminates just how far we have come from traditions of centuries ago…
I should have expected the exploitative nature of news coverage concerning Ebola. I don’t know why I thought the news media would offer an educational experience. Offerings on television and on websites have much in common with Shark Week and the coverage of the O.J. Simpson disaster. Watching a patient being transported from an airport…
This weekend’s Wall Street Journal featured a well-intentioned piece, “A Musical Fix For U.S. Schools,” which took up nearly 3/4 of a page with a huge accompanying photograph of a child playing the trumpet. Unfortunately this visual only added to the Oliver Twist like desperation of can I have some more porridge please, as the…