Don Pogreba is a current writer and retired teacher of English, Social Studies and Debate, and a loyal, if often sad, fan of the San Diego Padres and Portland Timbers. When he is not traveling, he is working on his classroom web site or dreaming about another adventure.
When I was very young, I dreamed that I would one day own a home with a library. It was a strange dream for a kid from a working class family, but I had rather vivid and specific expectations for what my library would one day look like. It would have been filled ceiling to floor with heavy, leather-bound books, hold a reading chair with...
Hurricane Harvey’s Impact — And How It Compares To Other Storms–Estimates of Harvey’s cost vary, with some predicting that the storm will be the most expensive in U.S. history at over $190 billion, surpassing Hurricane Katrina. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates Katrina to have cost around $160 billion.)...
Single Payer Is Not a Principle–Given the ill-will and recrimination, it’s easy to forget that this is a fight among friends and allies about how best to pursue shared goals and values. Much of the internal Democratic Party debate confuses instrumental operational questions with questions of core principle. By which I mean, to put...
The Lost Cause Rides Again–And all this must be added to a basic artistic critique—Confederate is a shockingly unoriginal idea, especially for the allegedly avant garde HBO. “What if the white South had won?” may well be the most trod-upon terrain in the field of American alternative history. There are novels about it, comic books...
One of the most interesting places I’ve traveled over the past few years was Memento Park in Budapest, an open-air museum filled with the detritus of Soviet rule over Eastern Bloc countries. There’s nothing the Soviets seemed to enjoy more than depositing gigantic statues of heroic communist workers, soldiers, and statesmen...
The Unabomber Couldn’t Kill David Gelernter. Now Gelernter Supports Donald Trump.–Gelernter still hasn’t given up on the internet—though, like any sane person, he thinks that children shouldn’t be exposed to it too often or too much. “The average kid doesn’t even know one tenth of the books in the school library,” he scoffed. “He...
Good teachers create little oases for themselves, while others who are less well prepared adopt approaches that are ineffective or even sometimes harmful. Some seek knowledge that is not readily available to them; others batten down the hatches and eventually become impermeable to better ideas. Schools are vulnerable to vendors selling...
A collection of interesting reads to provoke thought and provide fodder for conversation.
One of the real pleasures of solo travel is that a solo traveler can perhaps more easily decide to, say, go to a cheeseburger joint on his last night in Paris instead of seeking out more elevated cuisine. When that cheeseburger joint is located in a cool, quiet neighborhood and is ranked #6 among the 14,446 restaurants in Paris...