When we moved back to Atlanta in 1961 after most of a decade in Ohio and Indiana, I noticed a racial divide that bothered me then and has bothered me ever since. Suddenly, all of the people doing household and service chores were black. There were no white landscapers and many more of our neighbors … Continue reading The Mistake of Race in the Pandemic
Taking place in West Africa (in Mali, Burkina Faso and Togo) in the 1980s, Hard As Kersene is the story of four years away from home for a young American. It contains war and tragedy and alcoholism. When I first published Hard As Kersene, I did it without much editing and in a chapter order that, … Continue reading Hard As Kerosene, Revised Edition
Back when I was writing The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth in 2012, I was desperately hoping that, against all evidence, the dominant white cultures of the United States could begin to cross the barriers between them. I thought that, just maybe, I could help that happen by describing the … Continue reading What I Got So Wrong
I've been shocked by how little so many of my colleagues know about teaching online. I'm no expert, but it's something I've done in a number of contexts for a decade and a half. Here are some of my suggestions for teachers suddenly thrown into online teaching without preparation who are now looking at its … Continue reading Online Course Preparation with the Student in Mind
A set of snapshots from parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan:
One of the common elements of my dog walks over the last month has been the food trucks. Of course, they have always been there, but their numbers have not diminished while most other traffic has. There are the big sixteen-wheelers bringing nourishment from outside to supermarkets and wholesalers. There are the smaller delivery trucks … Continue reading Food
As he is not a teacher, not really, New York Times pundit David Brooks is able to accuse the higher GPA of English classes as opposed to Premed classes of being involved with “coddling.” If the grades are higher, students must be getting less out of the class. It’s too easy. Brooks writes from the … Continue reading Who Coddles Whom?
