I recently finished a novel by Damon Galgut called The Promise, the winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for 2021. A friend who is one of the most discerning and prolific readers I know recommended it lavishly, not his usual style, which communicated a sense of urgency, so may the God of Books forgive me, I ordered it from Amazon for next day delivery. The book begins in a South Africa...
If the name Pearson is familiar to you, it’s likely to be through the corporation’s stranglehold on the college textbook business with its notoriously inflated prices. Or it might be because of its inside track on the academic testing market. Almost every state has contracted with Pearson to create, publish and score the reading and math tests mandated by Federal and State agencies. In addition...
Every morning I wake up dreading the news of what new destruction the Russians have inflicted on innocent Ukrainians. Nonetheless, like most of us, I sit down at my desk to address the mundane, trivial business that life sets before me, free from the fear that, at any moment, a missile might shatter my fragile world. When you read what follows, don’t think for a minute that I have managed to...
We have a neighbor in our building, let’s call him Vasily, who is from Belarus, but went to school in Ukraine. He is a scientist like his father, who held a prominent position in the old Soviet scientific establishment. Growing up in the former Soviet Union has instilled in Vasily a mostly healthy skepticism about almost everything and a fear of being seen as what Israelis call a “freyer,” a...
I wrote recently about some troubling trends in education in New Hampshire where my children spent a significant portion of their school years and where I taught for a decade. Last time the focus was on the legislature’s passage of a bill prohibiting teachers from exposing their students to ideas or materials that would “cause discomfort.” By my reckoning, that places everything but the weather...