I work at a very fine institution of higher education in the Philadelphia area. I cannot stress how much I love working in the college atmosphere, so much so that I am pursuing my Master’s In Higher Education so I can support and advance my career in the college world. I feel like every day is exciting, and its always invigorating to walk onto a college campus. I think it even keeps me young, although I still haven’t learned how to properly “Dougie”, can’t figure out why kids like this rapper Drake, and (for humanity’s sake) I would never dare attempt to wear skinny jeans    [Read more →]

Tags: education, Marty digs by Marty O'Connor
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10. He delivers his speech without moving his lips, thanks to his little ventriloquist’s dummy ‘Muammar’

9. Her first name is Snooki

8. His speech is laced with crude double entendres and Polish jokes

7. He can’t emphasize enough the many incredible advantages of buying a ShamWow!

6. His claim to fame: He played Epstein on Welcome Back, Kotter

5. She goes on and on about how Barack Obama’s birth certificate has to be a forgery

4. Before he goes on, he asks the principal if he wants a little ‘nose candy’

3. He claims to have deciphered the “secret language of kitty cats”

2. He begins his speech, “If life hands you lemons, you should squeeze the juice directly into the wounds of your enemies.”

1. He spends an entire hour blathering on about his tiger’s blood, Adonis DNA, and fire-breathing fists

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

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The end of the world was supposed to happen on Saturday, it didn’t, but rapture jokes replaced Charlie Sheen jokes in the social media stratosphere. I am glad to know we weren’t all sucked into the ground from an earthquake, and happy that Jesus is waiting to make his second coming. I kindly pray that he at least hold off until I break the high score on the Ms. Pac-Man machine at my local pizza shop. However, my community got some very bad news about the end of a very special place in many hearts- St. Mary’s school in Gloucester City, New Jersey is going to be shutting its doors after this school year. [Read more →]

Tags: education, Marty digs by Marty O'Connor
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10. On your paper “What I Plan To Do After Graduation,” your teacher wrote “Guess again”

9. Your final paper in Music class was entitled “Why Justin Bieber Is the New Mozart”

8. The last time you picked up a book, it took you the better part of the afternoon to find all the Waldos

7. It’s bad enough you had an affair with a teacher, but the shop teacher?!

6. In Geography class, you identified the Ivory Coast as “two brands of soap”

5. In your high school yearbook, you were voted ‘Most Likely to Be Unable to Tell His Ass from a Hole in the Ground’

4. You were caught out on the football field, sticking a suppository into a hole in the ground

3. In Chemistry, the only elements you could name from the periodic table were Neon, Freon, Dione, and Leon

2. After years of instruction, you still talk into the wrong end of the telephone

1. The only history you learned all year long, you learned from Glenn Beck’s Classroom of the Air
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

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I have this ongoing belief that most of the woes we deal with as a nation, as a species are because we just haven’t paid enough attention; I think, I guess in what is an unshakable optimism about human potential (and you may read this as “delusion”), that once we are shocked awake to stupidity and injustice, we will fix it. In that regard, I am convinced that if we stepped back and thought hard — with real clarity and attention — about the amount of time U.S. students now spend preparing for the filling in of little bubbles and then filling in those bubbles, overnight we would have a massive education revolution. [Read more →]

Tags: education, virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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City schools in Buffalo, New York, are not exactly a shining example of the bright America we wish we could be. But, the use of a boycott to protest, draw attention to, and ultimately pout against the city’s sad state is a microcosm of modern society. It’s a small group of people who are making a lot of noise because they’re angry, and their form of protest is hurting those whom it should help. [Read more →]

Tags: education, politics & government by Dan Sterlace
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In less than a month, we will observe the birthday of Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, OM, GCVO and Master of the King’s Musick, who was born June 2, 1857. I rather like how it happens that his birthday coincides with that time of year when one of his works, Pomp and Circumstance March #1 (“Land of Hope and Glory”) has been heard so much, in so many places.
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Tags: education by Jeff McDonald
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I recently returned from a four-day road-trip (with my nephew Noah and his parents, traveling separately) to some of the Civil War battlefields. It’s a pilgrimage I’ve made more than once over the years, a way of embracing both nature and history. (Those blood-drenched meadows look terrific in the spring.) Done right, it can almost feel like time-travel.

Confederate cemetery at Appomattox

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Tags: education, ends & odd, race & culture, terror & war, travel & foreign lands by Jeff Scheuer
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Public employees protested hard, loud, and ugly in the Wisconsin State Capitol this week. Many of them teachers who called in sick. State Democrats just picked up and left the state. All this to stop legislation that would limit collective bargaining rights for unionized public employees. Governor Scott Walker has to address a $3.6 billion state shortfall before the state becomes insolvent and no one gets paid. The Republican governor decided to cut an expenditure, which,  after some post-protest concessions, essentially just curbs state pensions. He can do that or raise taxes on the majority of Wisconsinites who pay for their own pensions. Which would you do? [Read more →]

Tags: education, politics & government by Robert O'Hara
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In New Jersey, times are desperate for the public schools. Well, you say, things are tough all over. There’s just no money, you say. You’re broke. We’re all broke. So when those budgets come up for vote — because in Jersey the only budget you get to vote directly for is your local public school budget — you’re voting ’em down.

Sure. I want you to tell me the one again about the crisis we’re facing supporting and financing public schools in our culture. Tell me how we’re all stretched and suffering and we have to vote “no” on these budgets. [Read more →]

Tags: education, virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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Remember Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind, with his meaty, square-ended finger pile-driving into his lectern as he tells the kids in his classroom that the world has no room for “fancy”? — that “fact” is all that matters? Well, he is alive and well. There are people walking around who think that imagination and creativity are extraneous human endeavors. Of course, they probably think this because they often witness artistic idiots skipping around and scattering rose petals up to the harsh winds of reality. It is a cultural snake that eats itself, really. [Read more →]

Tags: artistic unknowns by Chris Matarazzo, education by Chris Matarazzo
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“Sancho followed on foot, leading his donkey — his perpetual companion in prosperous and adverse fortune….”  — Don Quixote

In these threadbare days, what kind of future do we foresee for that homeliest and homiest of institutional beasts, the public library? It is surely the donkey of the American cultural menagerie — toothy, overworked, belittled, yet stubborn to the point of endearment. How else, other than out of sheer stubbornness, can we account for the fact that libraries continue to supply communities all over the country with books… made of paper…to the public… for free?

But for residents of Santa Clarita, California, this persistent belief in community education in the age of the bottom line may at last be coming to an end. Thanks to the city’s controversial vote to outsource its libraries to a private for-profit company, the donkey may be going the way of the dodo.

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Tags: education, politics & government by Peter Mann
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While I was waiting for the train during an afternoon commute last week, I ran into him for the second time. A little boy, probably five or six. He ran wild on the platform. He played on the train tracks. He smashed the pay phone against a metal rail. He screamed at people. Last time, he also threw rocks at cars in a nearby  parking lot. [Read more →]

Tags: education, virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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After last night’s election, it’s time to begin thinking about where we should make the first cuts to the Federal budget.  Obviously the spending we most need to address is entitlement spending like SSI, Medicare, Medicaid, etc, but we’re all realistic enough to know that even the TEA Party endorsed Congresscritters won’t touch that with a ten foot pole yet.  So what discretionary spending should be targeted first?

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Tags: education, politics & government by Mike McGowan
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Interview with Alex Kudera, author of Fight for Your Long Day

I have known Alex Kudera since 1996 when he and I met in the café of Borders Bookstore in Center City, Philadelphia. A couple years later, Alex and I worked together as adjuncts at Temple University and at Drexel University. Alex has now written a novel, the just-published Fight for Your Long Day, and it is a bracing, painful, and sometimes funny look at the life of an adjunct college teacher in the early 2000’s.

Although Alex currently teaches full-time at Clemson University in South Carolina, he is quick to note that working full-time does not mean tenure. I recently interviewed him about Fight for Your Long Day, published by Atticus Books.

Below are some of the excerpts.

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Tags: art & entertainment, books & writing, education, family & parenting, race & culture, sports by Robert Anthony Watts
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All of my life I’ve been told rule after rule by every snooty english teacher that the public school system, and all educational institutions beyond that could throw at me.  Periods this, commas that, apostrophe my butt.  We get it guys, writing is boring. [Read more →]

Tags: education, language & grammar, mostly kidding by Matt Scottoline by Matt Scottoline
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Lately I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I have recurrent dreams about something that is so terrifying, so stressful, and so dreadful, it is invading my subconscious, waking me at all hours of the night, and rendering me unable to fall back asleep. What, you ask, is keeping me up at night? The answer: preschool. That’s right, I’m having preschool nightmares. [Read more →]

Tags: education, family & parenting by Nancy DeGregorio
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10. “When my last roommate gave me any trouble, I just beat him with a sockful of nickels.”

9. “What’s the point of having two beds in this room?”

8. “I’m studying the flesh-eating virus, so all these drawers here are off limits.”

7. “Hope you don’t mind all the Justin Bieber posters.”

6. “Oh, Glenn Beck is like God to me!”

5. “So which are you, Team Edward or Team Jacob?”

4. “Hi, I’m Steven, but on the weekends I’m Stephanie.”

3. “Seriously, some of Al-Qaeda’s principles aren’t as crazy as they sound.”

2. “I haven’t stopped crying since I found out the Cathy comic strip was ending.”

1. “Goodnight snuggle?”
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

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10. Origami

9. House Sitting

8. Forensic Musicology

7. Spitballing

6. Betamax Repair

5. Competitive Eating

4. Congressional Ethics

3. Sculpting with Tarballs

2. Latin

1. Bong Maintenance
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

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10. You’ve only ever heard of it in the PennySaver

9. The college application was an insert in a McDonald’s menu

8. It’s run by defrocked nuns

7. The only book in the library has already been colored in

6. Last year’s commencement speaker was Justin Bieber

5. They spell it “U. N. I. V. E. R. C. I. T. Y.”

4. They boast “fewer felons on the faculty than last year”

3. The photo on the cover of the college catalogue: Snooki

2. The “Dean’s office” is a ’57 Buick

1. Most famous alumnus: Rod Blagojevich
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

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