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.
In spite of the professional pretense to neutrality, academics need to do more pedagogically than simply teach students how to be adept at forms of argumentation. Students need to argue and question, but they need much more from their educational experience. The pedagogy of argumentation in and of itself guarantees nothing but it is an...
collection of interesting reads to provoke thought and provide fodder for conversation.
As had happened in the past, the law employing the vehicle of a major judicial decision offered symbolic encouragement to the black dispossessed. The substantive losses so feared by its white adversaries evolved almost unnoticed into advances greater for whites than for blacks. And a half-century later, as must now be apparent to all...
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...
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...
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...
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. . . ...
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...
