The Crocodile in the Common Core Standards

“[A]s you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”  Thus, Common Core Standards architect David Coleman delivered[1] the core pedagogy of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)  to educators gathered at the New York State Department of Education in April 2011. [...]

“Click, Clack, Moo”: Why the 1% Always Wins

As a high school English teacher for nearly two decades, I came to embrace a need to offer students a wide range of lenses for interacting with and learning from many different texts, but I also learned that coming to read and re-read, to write and re-write the world is both a powerful and disorienting [...]

Quds Force II – The Storyline Repeats Itself

By Michael Collins (Washington, DC)  A faction of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard called the Quds Force (QF) is center stage in the War on Terror for the second time in five years. In 2007, President George W. Bush hauled out the group of middle and upper level Iranian government officials as a rationale for military [...]

Occupy Wall Street: The T-Shirt

“It’s time, the anger is boiling over and we’re sick of being taken advantage of and taken for granted! Occupy Wall Street! It is time to stop the greed and bring about real social change,” so states what sounds like a passionate tweet from a 19-year-old New York University undergrad skipping her sociology classes to [...]

Occupy This: US History exposes the 1%’s crimes, then and now. 2b of 6

Occupy This: US History exposes the 1%’s crimes then and now. 2b of 6 By Carl Herman, Nonpartisan Examiner   Occupy Wall Street (and nationwide) has three emerging objectives: Public recognition of the 1%’s crimes, centering on war and money. End war and money crimes that annually kill millions, injure billions, and loot trillions of our dollars. Build a [...]