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.
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,"...
Probably funny to say that a commercial for a TV channel would make me more excited to visit Denmark over spring break, but it’s hard not to love this.
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...
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...
I read this book for debate on the 2015-16 debate topic, and it didn’t disappoint as a resource for some excellent impact cards. This litany of economic and political risks might be enough to cause observers to alter their long-term assumptions about Asia’s prospects. Yet there is a fifth risk to be mapped, the most dangerous of...
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...
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...
While this was the year I finally read the Harry Potter series and revisited some old favorites like Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, I also managed to read a collection of surprising and interesting titles that were neither about wizards and witches nor books I had read and loved before. Of the 80 or so...