I have been following Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s journey in space for some time now, and on May 13th, he stepped down from his command of the International Space Station. He has been on the artificial satellite since December 2012, when he arrived as part of Expedition 35, a six-person crew.
2. We Must Always Help Each Other
3. The Boy Scouts of America are All-Inclusive
4. Terrorism Only Happens on Foreign Soil
When I was young my mother told me that as children, our minds were like sponges and that we could absorb much knowledge that our teachers gave over to us. An important thing that I would like to add to that, however, is that the transfer of information from teacher to student cannot be the only thing that happens from the time the student arrives in school until they go home for the day. Recess, it turns out, is an extremely important part of the children’s day.
As a child of the 1980′s, the playground was rather unfortunately the place many people went for sex ed — the kind of sex ed that wasn’t taught in classrooms. Kids would ask each other what it was like to touch a woman’s breast, and what the experience was to do all kinds of things that most kids didn’t do at that age. If it wasn’t from the playground, it was from older brothers, who seemed to always know what they were saying but were often just as misinformed as their younger brethren.
While my wife Elizabeth and seventeen month old son Chaim Yosef were recently visiting Washington State, we had a fantastic opportunity to visit a farm and to see some interesting animals including a miniature pony and a pack of alpacas. It was the alpacas that we had come to see and that I had long been interested in seeing ever since I had the idea for a humor website based on Lolcats that would be called Lolalpacaz. I never made the site but my fascination with the animal continued even though they are a fairly goofy looking animal.
There are a lot of things going wrong in New York Public schools — there is overcrowding and a lack of funding, teachers that get shipped off to rubber rooms and too many children that find a lack of reason to pay attention in class. Now on top of all that, teachers have to be careful how they write their tests because they now have to avoid using certain words that are deemed to be unpleasant to students.
I have seen quite a few interesting websites in the past few weeks that have cropped up that have evidence of various kinds that Trayvon Martin, who was shot dead by a neighborhood watchman, was suspended from school and that he was a small time drug dealer. None of the websites I have seen thusfar have provided any reason why he, at the time that he was killed, was doing anything remotely threatening that would possibly cause a person to feel the need to shoot him in so-called self-defense.
People who take on roles of authority — police officers, business owners, parents — are often caught in the trap of being accused of being tyrants. Tyranny is not authority and knowing the difference with a distinction is important.
According to public data easily accessible through Google’s public data explorer, the current unemployment rate in the United States is 9.1% — and in Georgia it is 10.3%. The reason I bring up Georgia specifically is because of something that is going on at Shorter University, based in Rome, Georgia.
When I receive my daily Google Alerts, I usually cringe when I need my name invoked in web properties beyond which I control because it usually means I’m dead again, or being accused of something that isn’t true.
Portable computing has come a long way since the Compaq computer my mother used to lug around with her back and forth from work — I distinctly remember trying to lift it as a child and struggling. I believe that my mother told me at the time that it weighed nearly thirty pounds. Still it was impressive to me — that you could take a whole computer with you wherever you wanted from room to room and just plug it in and use it! As time has gone on smaller and smaller computers have come about — the smart phones of today are more clever than some of the biggest computers of twenty and thirty years ago.
When I was in high school, I had a crush on a fellow student that happened to live in room 23 of her dormitory. It wasn’t too long before I found out indirectly that she actually had less than no interest in me and so I didn’t attempt to pursue any kind of relationship with her — I just didn’t want to get hurt. Not long after these events, however, I began noticing that the number 23 was popping up everywhere. I would notice it on a box of cereal, or a page in a library book would be dogeared to that exact page. What a coincidence, I thought, that I had recently had a crush on a girl who lived in room 23 and now the number seemed to be following me everywhere I went.
Society is materialistic. The university used to be a safe haven where ideas mattered and thoughts were given greater standing than finding ways to make more money. Peter Thiel believes higher education is a bubble ready for the bursting — but you can only agree with Thiel’s thesis if you also believe students attend university to get a job. I don’t happen to purchase his premise. I believe students should attend university in order to learn what they do not know.
We all work to try to keep out brains alive through our eyes, and there’s a new way of creating fresh pathways of understanding — and it is delivered to us from afar via our old friend, William Shakespeare using language and “Functional Shifts” found in his plays.
