Food for Thought: If your vote didn't matter then the Republican Party would not be spending so much time trying to block it, dilute it, throw it out, or just plain ignore it.

What would be the consequences if I just turned this into a #birding account?

#Astoriatheturkey walking past the Sea Glass Carousel at Battery Park in Manhattan.

Not going to lie. I have long pondered that our condition would be significantly better if many professional philanthropists had spent their wealth building real world versions of Mario Kart tracks.

Exciting news for our oldest: She is about to gain her second professional publication credit! The publisher of "Jewish Futures" put out a call for a new volume on themes of resistance and her story was selected! We don't have a publication date yet but the proofs are already being reviewed.

The new information economy: "News Based" Tik Tok Influencer: This special election in Virginia is the Democrats' worst election since Trump was re-elected. Me: "Oh my that sounds bad..." *Looks up the district* It's voted Republican since it was created in 1982. This is just exhausting.

This is nearly 5% of our GDP. And a huge portion of it will be financed by borrowing. As a comparison, ALL spending - federal, state, and local - on K-12 education comes to about 3.11% of our GDP. Eisenhower would weep.

I will repeat what I said -- this production is worth the trip to Grove Street on the PATH! The production is well directed and produced, and the cast is just outstanding. If you went to the Stratford Festival in Ontario or the Oregon Festival in Ashland, and saw this it would fit right in!

When people say that teacher unions "protect their members and not kids" I hear them saying they think their kids' educations would be well served by teachers who can be fired on a whim, who struggle to keep up with the cost of living, and who are one health scare away from bankruptcy.

We went last night because our good friend Frederick Secrease is in the cast. Genuinely blown away by how good this cast and production are. This would be entirely at home at the Stratford Festival in Ontario or the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Go, go, go.

I actually got our 16 year old to concede a point in a political discussion, and I feel like I haven't accomplished an intellectual feat that significant since my dissertation defense.

"In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

Repeated observation: That wave of overwhelming relief you feel when something that should not have been difficult to resolve is resolved is a trauma response.

Students are returning from Spring Break and perhaps this mood check slide is identifying myself as just a touch too online?

It genuinely amazes me that after decades of making teachers' working conditions and students' learning conditions vastly worse that DFER types still show their faces in public and get rewarded for knowing absolutely nothing. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/o...

Oof.

Never ceases to amaze me how many still believe retention works. Like children will suddenly become motivated to learn to read if they flunk a grade and watch their friends move on. Especially when they were pushed to read in kindergarten before they were ready. nancyebailey.com/2017/10/09/f...

Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, prepares you for the stage of life when your kids still need you, you are supposed to have peak responsibilities at work, and your parents become frail.

It will never stop being weird to me that Bari Weiss has managed a successful and seemingly lucrative career based on mistaking being unlikable with being bravely iconoclastic.

Reviving this thread here: Higher Education Administrators: We are fully committed to the principles of DEI and believe our institution stands for social progress in society. Higher Education Faculty: Great! We'd like to form a union. Higher Education Administrators: No, not like that.

I am proud our family are members at BJ. Rabbi Felicia Sol navigated every difficult turn in this Yom Kippur Sermon beautifully. We don't have to run away from hard things. In fact, we just shouldn't. youtu.be/H32_aWTHoUo?...

Maybe I can't save the world but I can save this little oven bird who bounced off of a building window.

Made this back in 2017. Feels evergreen:

Required reading: www.nybooks.com/articles/199...

It goes without saying that this is horrific: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/u...

Current Mood:

Our daughter is getting a double room in a suite after spending two weeks in a "forced triple" room. So Friday morning I hit the road super early to bring her remaining stuff and set it up before her pm shift in the scenery construction shop. And I have to say goodbye again. Give me strength.

Not entirely sure that the Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog soundtrack is getting me in the right mood for a long teaching block...But I am not changing the music.

It isn't the biggest issue we face as a nation, but every time I see the current state of the Oval Office I want to head down to D.C. with a putty knife and a ladder and get to work fixing it.

What do you mean I am just supposed to wake up every morning and our daughter is not here? #parentofacollegekid

American Chattel Slavery was: Permanent Inheritable Imposed entirely on the basis of race Subject to virtually zero standards whatsoever and enforceable by total brutality In the history of the world that makes the "peculiar institution" in the United States especially heinous.

I’m terribly afraid that I have misled our daughter about the overall organizational skills of most of the professoriate.

The gap between higher- and lower-spending education states is growing. www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/revisit...

Watching someone you love trying to figure out how to make Apple OS do things locally is painful.

I held a very minor but elected position for 4 years. I did get the opportunity to rub a few elbows with careerist, and while the people I met were earnest and wanted to do good, the compulsion to be IN office always baffled me.

Our eldest has been on a Falsettos obsession lately, so I handed her "And the Band Played On" for context. She is both grateful and angry at me which is about the right reaction I think for someone really learning what happened and who refused to care.

I sometimes wonder if generative AI experts and commentators who assert that they are able to "sense" the artificiality in writing created by LLMs are falling into a reverse "Eliza effect" by attributing artificiality to writing because they know AI was involved rather than by objective standards.

This is not why I became a teacher educator.

Trump telling the Q-anon wing of MAGA that there are no Epstein Files is like trying to tell the world's Christians that is no Resurrection. It's an attack on an absolutely foundational belief for the movement and demanding they become ontologically unmoored moving forward.

LOL

One of the more jarring aspects of social media is how often it suggests that I follow or friend people who I know for a fact are dead.

They are threatening the university with a law school named after SCALIA.

Our daughter has been worldbuilding again for a new project, and I got a glimpse of some of her work which includes: A spreadsheet projecting the exact date of each leap day in the new world's calendar from the next 300 years. This kid never stops amazing me.

@microsoft.com has inserted #copilot into Teams and I have to say that I hate it a lot.

Our almost 13 year old car with 165K miles has an uncanny ability to develop mechanical problems right before the NJ Turnpike exit to Carteret. This time I think it is pretty well fatal.

This could become a fascinating test case in schools using Hirsch's core knowledge curriculum...

2023 data: Number of Americans killed by books: 0 Number of Americans killed by guns: 46,728 Let’s ban books then. 🤪

It's not just books. It's really anything. Parents will try to opt out of media, assemblies, field trips, etc. It'll be chaotic in some schools and districts.