Dams generate power by altering the natural environment and the natural flow of water, creating structures to generate power. The state generates power by altering ‘natural’ relations of people, creating structures to generate power. Of course, the state is also responsible for creating dams. I wish I could claim this thoughtful parallelism as my own,…
Month: May 2021
Writing for 10 days
One idea I’ve been working around as I complete 10 days of writing 700+ words a day of [roughly edited but intended to be legible] ideas is that writing isn’t actually that hard, but generating novel, interesting or worthwhile ideas is a big part of the challenge. Journaling for myself is focused more on debriefing…
Climate Change and Social Studies
A couple of years ago at the start of the academic year, I utilized climate change as a case study to understanding how power functions, as well as how political issues look different at different levels of analysis (community, local, national, regional, international, global). It turned out to be one of the most energizing starts…
Teaching about Africa
I don’t know how to teach about Africa, and yet it must be done. That might be a surprising admission for someone who lived on the continent for three years, who has studied, wrote about, and talked about Botswana, the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Somalia, South Africa, and Tanzania in some depth, and seriously considered…
Motivation and Remote Learning
More than ever before, especially as we approach the end of a largely remote school year, I’ve heard from students, “I just don’t have any motivation, Mr. R.” I’ve found that motivation and enthusiasm for learning are contagious. When a few students get excited about a topic or idea in an in-person classroom setting, other…
The Games of Children
There’s an opinion piece in the New York Times today called “To Focus on Hamas Is to Miss the Point.” In it, Basma Ghalayini discusses growing up in Gaza, where experiences or near misses with violence are not a novel experience, but instead are a fundamental part of living in what is effectively an open-air…
Animal Consciousness & Suffering
How often do you really make an effort to put ourselves in someone’s shoes, and try to see things as they see them? And how often do you do that for animals? I suspect the answer to the first question for most people is sometimes, and that that is rarely for the latter. I’ve long…
Remote learning
Teachers across the United States, and probably much of the world, will tell you that this year has been one like none other, and they are not exaggerating. What many of us now take as normal – a virtual room full of student avatars, varied uses of synchronous and asynchronous time, participating in the chat…
News & Structural Violence
Last week, a handful of students walked (or logged into) my classes asking about what was happening with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of the interesting elements of the news cycle’s return to the conflict is the way the news cycle itself responds to an escalation in violence on the part of Israel or Palestinians, but…
Expert knowledge
Why are we so confident about what we know? We assume expert or high-level knowledge in many fields of knowledge for which we have no rational basis to assume we are experts. Even in fields where we might justifiably be called experts, we regularly fail to make the best possible judgments, decisions, or predictions. Obviously,…