The Material World: A Global Family Portrait by Peter Menzel and Charles C. Mann was a staple in every classroom library I assembled over the years. It’s one of those rare books that carves deep grooves in your brain that never fade. The authors sent 16 photographers to 30 different nations to live with statistically “average” families for a week. At the end of the visit, the photographers...

There are days when the brain waves don’t come together to form a single coherent line of thinking. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot going on. It’s just pizza by the slice, rather than the whole pie. Sometimes, as I write, one slice emerges larger than the rest. Let’s see what happens. First, there’s one of my favorite subjects, relationships. We’ve all been reading about the isolating effects...

I’ll start with a confession. When faced with a choice between reading a professional book (professional = an education-adjacent text) vs. a novel or memoir, I’ll opt for the latter. It was true even before I retired, but I had to keep that impulse in check then to remain current. Make no mistake, there are many books in the field that have left a deep impression on me. They were central in...

In recent years we’ve tried to get as close as we can to watching all the movies nominated for Oscars. It’s a lot easier now that most of those movies are available on the streaming services. One that we were especially eager to see was the Iranian film “It Was Just an Accident.” I’ll explain the eagerness in a minute but first let me tell you about this movie. A group of Iranians living in a...

I promised to continue my account of the way our lives have been infused with theater experiences at every stage. Before I move on to our extended – and happy – years in Houston and Chicago, let me stay in New Hampshire a bit longer to add something important that I forgot to include last week. For six years, I was the teaching principal in a small NH town. Many of my parents worked in a paper...