Author - Don Pogreba

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.

Monday Morning Mental Mix for May 15, 2017

We are teaching kids how to write all wrong — and no, Mr. Miyagi’s rote lessons won’t help a bit–Knowing this might make one tempted to give up altogether. Perhaps it’s simply impossible to teach students to write in today’s world. Maguire suggests we have indeed given up on the task, claiming that the “composition profession...

Monday Morning Mental Mix May 8, 2017

Malcolm Gladwell on Why We Shouldn’t Value Speed Over Power–Not even Roger Federer could be a great tennis player without a coach, without a place to go and play tennis, without parents who drive him there. Roger Federer, for years, was known for having a terrible temper. At the beginning of his career he was thought to be someone...

Friends Come In and Out of Your Life Like Busboys in a Restaurant

Through the connection offered by Facebook, I learned some sad news this weekend that a classmate from high school had suffered a heart attack and, as a result, had been placed in a medically-induced coma. At a time in my life when I still like to pretend that I am as young and spry as I was in high school, the news came as a tremendous...

Why I am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto by Jessa Crispin

To feel safe, you need to control what the people around you are going to say and do. This is not achieved by going after the root causes of violence. This is not even achieved by working to slowly improve social conditions. It is achieved through silence and disappearance, by moving the offending object or person out of sight. . . ...

Monday Morning Mental Mix April 17, 2017

Why men rape–Such was the lamentable state of affairs when the feminist activist Susan Brownmiller introduced her ground-breaking feminist work on rape Against Our Will (1975) with the dictum: ‘[Rape] is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.’ Brownmiller...