As a professor, I work with public school teachers who are in the process of becoming certified to teach in the New York City Department of Education in a program called the New York City Teaching Fellows. These new teachers support students from all over the world, many of whom are immigrants or children of…
Trunk or Treat: silly, spontaneous community in a cemetery
Yesterday I was walking in my neighborhood along a path that includes a beautiful cemetery with winding paths and lovely bent old trees. A cheerful orange-and-black clad woman greeted me from her seat at a welcome table as I walked up to the gates. “What’s happening today?” I asked, as kids in Spiderman and gorilla…
“Time Enough at Last”: screens and the elusive book
I’ve been watching episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” an old black-and-white TV series that ran from 1959 to 1964 and told weird, sometimes futuristic, often Kafkaesque tales that made the viewer twist uncomfortably or stare rapt in suspended horror at the screen. Unknown, mostly White male actors, limited and mundane sets (by today’s standards), oddly-rhythmed…
A Night at the Garden: White supremacy and collective forgetting
“A Night at the Garden” is a short film that depicts a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1939. Billed as a “pro-American” rally, the images of the columns of white, uniformed men from the ethnic German group called the German American Bund striking drums, carrying swastika-adorned banners, and displaying…
Education is a right
Just got home from teaching at City College, where I work with public school teachers developing their pedagogical practice and scholarship as grad students in the City University of New York, arguably the oldest public university system in the country (rivaled only by the University of California). I am a teaching fellow in the same…
The intellectual’s desperate need for self-parody as a Professional Smarty Pants
After the inspiring first class of Introduction to Dialectics with Stanley Aronowitz this weekend among many seasoned thinkers and established intellectuals, I felt the need to reflect on the experience of being a Professional Smarty Pants and my socialization, for better or worse, into this motley group. I’m increasingly convinced that self-awareness is in desperate…
Public schools: the starting point for questions, for possibility, for the anti-dictate
I am a field mentor for student teachers getting their masters degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) at New York University. I myself am not a public school teacher, and for this reason, I love coming to schools and working with student teachers and their mentoring cooperating teachers over the course…
Crisis → recovery → crisis → recovery, etc…and the alternative: Bakhtin’s/Tina Turner’s co-authored future
19 minutes ago, my phone lit up with a headline from the New York Times: Top Stories: President Trump’s reckless threats could set the nation “on the path to World War III,” said Senator Bob Corker, an influential Republican Headlines like this feel relatively common, a reminder that crisis upon crisis has become the status…
The question of community: climate change, DACA, and environmental racism
Hurricane Harvey is striking Houston and 50 other counties in Texas, pounding the region with enough water to fill the football stadiums of the NFL and all colleges across the country 100 times. Nearly impossible to imagine. At the same time, one-third of Bangladesh is under water in a monsoon season that has been strongly…
Abstract art and the proceduralization of physicality
While the title of this post is ambiguous at best and horribly abstruse at worst (by the way, linguist’s nerdy moment: the word “abstruse,” which means “difficult to understand, obscure,” is in itself abstruse), I think it’s the best way to describe a piece of installation art by Jeff Kasper in an exhibit I saw at…
