Ever since the Inauguration of Donald Trump last month, I have kept silent about the terrible things that are happening to our country right now.  But I kept thinking about this poem I’d read several years ago and it kept haunting me.  Here it is: First They Came by Pastor Martin Niemoller First they came...Read More

We’re all focused on the COVID-19 virus right now, but an even greater threat to our nation and our world is the Trumpona Virus (TRUVID-20).  Viruses don’t have the ability to replicate themselves, so what they do is insinuate themselves into a cell body and deceptively and parasitically co-opt the mechanisms and materials of that...Read More

When I was seven years old, I was at the local barbershop in my hometown of Fargo, North Dakota, when I picked up a Life Magazine that had Anne Frank on the cover (August 18, 1958 – see image on the left).  I remember looking through the magazine and seeing pictures of people with black...Read More

A new report by John Rogers, director of the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at the University of California at Los Angeles, indicates that the divisiveness of the Trump era has sent student stress rates skyrocketing.  More than half of the public school teachers surveyed reported ”high levels of stress and anxiety” in their students...Read More

An opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times really made a deep impression on me as an educator. It was written by Libyan novelist Hisham Matar, and entitled:  ‘‘Books Can Take You Places Donald Trump Doesn’t Want You to Go.”  Mattar writes about how books can help us ”stumble upon ourselves in the lives and...Read More