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.

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell Books

This is a book I wish I had come across a decade or so ago. The unhappiness of men in relationships, the grief men feel about the failure of love, often goes unnoticed in our society precisely because the patriarchal culture really does not care if men are unhappy. When females are in emotional pain, the sexist thinking that says that...

Monday Morning Mental Mix Tape February 06, 2017

Federal Disobedience: Why We Must Support Federal Worker Noncooperation–After 17 years at the US State Department, for example, TJ Lunardi decided to call it quits. Like other senior foreign service officers who, on January 25, 2017, left in what Washington Post journalist Josh Rogin characterized as an "ongoing mass exodus,"...

Monday Morning Mental Mix Tape January 30, 2017

The Human Toll of Protecting the Internet from the Worst of Humanity–Henry Soto worked for Microsoft’s online-safety team, in Seattle, for eight years. He reviewed objectionable material on Microsoft’s products—Bing, the cloud-storage service OneDrive, and Xbox Live among them—and decided whether to delete it or report it to the...

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Seven Essential Quotes)

People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even...

Photos: Cappadocia, Turkey December 2016

The weather was certainly gray and snowy for most of my trip through Cappadocia, but the overcast conditions only served to make the moments of vibrant blue skies even more beautiful. The weather prevented me from experiencing one of the iconic hot air balloon trips, but I had an incredible experience exploring underground cities...

Between the World and Me: Seven Essential Quotes

I read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates last year shortly after it was released, but had the opportunity to read it again with my AP Language class this year, where it sparked some really interesting conversation and debate. While I highlighted some thought provoking, engaging, enraging, or beautiful passage on almost every...