A few presidential cycles ago I was invited by the League of Women Voters to participate in a panel discussion of charter schools which they were hosting to inform their position on the issue for the upcoming election. In addition to me, the panelists included a union activist, a representative of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools and an academic researcher specializing in the comparative...
Years ago, the New York Times Sunday Book Review section ran an occasional feature for which they got writers and other public figures to confess the titles of literary classics they had never read. Absolutely everyone has egg on their face when they’re made to out themselves this way. My own list would fill a sizeable notebook. One of my pandemic resolutions that fared better than some household...
When we lived in New Hampshire, the middle school our daughters attended was down the hill from our house. We often drove by the school late in the evening on our way home from a meeting or a visit to friends. No matter how late the hour the lights were always on in Mr. B’s room which our daughters could identify because at different times he was their English teacher That was a worrisome sight...
I’m writing this on Tuesday, February 9th. Yesterday, Rosellen and I received our second dose of the Pfizer vaccine at the University of Chicago Hospital, which is the location of almost all our health care services. The hospital has been extremely efficient about looking after its own roster of patients. We didn’t have to scramble for an appointment slot. They contacted us with available dates...
About six months ago, my wife bought a Kindle. This was a move of serious consequence for a writer whose whole life has centered around books, real books, ones that have heft and smell and whose pages are laid out in pleasing configurations of font size and spacing. But she had two very valid reasons for stepping across what had previously been a border guarded by dragons. First, changes in...