If we need more evidence the world is imploding on its own good misdeeds, we need look no further than the weight of the ridiculousness that the Urban Dictionary is now being used in courts of law to define colloquial phrases and to help educate judges and juries as to “meaning in the street.”
Today, May 4, 2013 marks the sixth anniversary of what used to be the “Boles University Blog.” That fine scholarship and research blog is now folded into this even finer, and richer, and deeper Boles Blogs Blog, and in celebration of promoting online pedagogy and in-person teaching, let’s take a look at the fascinating, and new, “Digital Public Library” of America! 
Continue reading
Well, we’ve sunk to the following new low arriving in a school email from university administrative powers –with a standard pre-warning that this is informational only, and not based on a current threat — with an active link to a NYPD Shield Safety Pamphlet included for good measure:
NYPD says: Avoid. Barricade. Confront. (ABC)
DHS says: Run. Hide. Fight.
The words are different, but the three actions are essentially the same:
1. Get out and get away, as quietly and quickly as possible, leaving your belongings behind. Run. Avoid.
2. If you can’t flee, lock or barricade the doors, silence your cell phone and hide. Hide. Barricade.
3. If all else fails, and only as a last resort, attack the shooter with whatever makeshift weapons you can find (scissors, portable fire extinguishers, chairs, etc.) to disarm and disable. Fight. Confront.
Of course, call 911 to report the attack as soon as it is safe for you to do so.
Today, the University of Nebraska held its annual Spring football game. There’s a mix-and-match of talent on both sides of the football. Red Team vs. White Team. The Spring Game is a Lincoln ritual, and everyone loves it because Nebraska, playing Nebraska, means Nebraska always wins!
GO BIG RED!
There were over 60,000 people today at the Spring game in Lincoln, and the highlight of the day was when seven-year-old brain cancer patient Jack Hoffman came off the bench and into the game to score, what turned out to be the winning 69-yard touchdown, for the Red team!
GO BIG JACK!
I have never been a fan of standardized testing in schools. There’s too big a variable at play — missing the wild mind — and these tests praise and condone only the middle. If you don’t do well on these tests, you are not moved forward or thought of as a significant thinker. The system doesn’t mind if your wild view of the world matters. The only thing the test givers care about is finding, and approving, the mainstream, middling, mind to guarantee, and impress, conformity.
Mike Rice is the head coach — and Head Bully — of the Rutgers University basketball team. By the time you read this, Rice may be long gone, but his bloody head will not be the only one rolling down College Avenue. Athletic Director Tim Pernetti most certainly should lose his head as well — as should Pernetti’s school bosses, like the President Robert Barchi, who, it appears, refused, along with Pernetti, to fire Mike Rice in November 2012 even after watching video evidence of the coach physically and verbally abusing his undergraduate basketball team during practice. The Rutgers Board of Trustees must act now and clean the Rutgers house and fire Mike Rice, Tim Pernetti and President Robert Barchi — because they were all in collusion to not protect the welfare of the student athletes entrusted to their care.
Ask a random current student if he or she has read something by William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, or Mark Twain, and the answer will almost certainly be a yes— whether that “yes” is voiced with fondness, indifference, or bitterness. Ask that student’s parents or grandparents the same question, and despite generational gaps, the answer likely will not change.
Willa Cather is one of the greatest American Artists to ever set words to paper. She wasn’t a “Gay Author” as some are wont to claim — she was a public writer who didn’t seem to care much for sexual definitions in her private life away from the page.
The quintessential “American Dream” is one of the most pervasive and iconic themes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — our mentors push us toward it; the media glamorizes it; poor Jay Gatsby died trying to achieve it. However, as young graduates across the nation return to their parents’ homes with diplomas in one hopeful hand, the goal of proud, self-governed homeownership seems to slip further and further away.
I am cheating a little and using the Four Corners concept to quickly introduce to you people and ideas so that future articles on Portugal make a lot more sense.
Introducing Mr P — who does not really wish to be on the internet at all. Ironically, I met Mr P online playing a rather silly game called Tribal Wars. Mr P was born in Morocco of French parents and has been living in Portugal for most of his life. He has a degree in Biology from Pau University. He speaks French, Portuguese and English extremely well and has knowledge of Spanish, Italian and German as well. He has a strong sense of history and of culture. The mix of our cultures and our language brings a lot of humour to our lives. We love to travel — not just in the broadest sense — but in the everyday sense of exploration; not only of ourselves and our lives but in the beauty found all around us. We have adventures everywhere! This picture was taken at our handfasting where we took our vows in front of friends and family.
I currently teach in an old Midtown building in the center of New York City that used to house a secretarial typing school. Legend has it that because there were lots of nefarious “students” in and around the “school” in the past, video cameras were placed in every corridor and cranny to record any crimes for the police that might take place.
If you had the choice to live to age 200, would you take up that blind offer? My beloved wife Janna would not. She’s perfectly content with her life and, if she died today, she would feel satisfied with the accomplishments of her life. I, on the other hand, would love to live to age 200 if, of course, there were no sort of Twilight Zone curse involved where I was confined to a bed in a coma for 125 years, or I became a pack mule in the Himalayas for a century, or if I had to live in an active sewer and never see the light of day for 110 years.
Grade inflation is a major problem on college campuses, and it is the sworn duty of the faculty to carefully and cautiously grade all student work the same. Students tend to expect an “A” grade just for showing up to class when, in structured reality, a “C” grade is what a student earns for merely meeting the minimum requirements for any course. A “C” is a fine grade — but a lot of students seem to feel a “C” grade is the same as an “F” grade when it is not. A “C” defines the middling ground for a course and that is the honest grade most students earn, even though faculty tend to inflate grading the middle just to keep the peace.
I’m not sure if there’s much more left to to say in the wake of the Sandy Hook killings in Connecticut that hasn’t already been shot to death before — except that it was excellent how, together, teachers and students faced down death that day — while our politicians will never be similarly brave because they are more terrified of the long and ugly shadow of the NRA than they are of dead children.
