Ilya Livshits was my student for two years in back-to-back AP classes and a key member of HHS Debate, though he focused primarily on Model Congress over Model United Nations. He was a constant participant in class and was quick to play devil’s advocate on any issue, keeping me honest and relatively fair as a …
Continue reading “Tuesday Talk… with Ilya Livshits, HHS 2003”
When I began teaching AP US Government and Politics there was no guidance about which cases would end up on the exam. As a consequence, I focused on at least 30 different cases that I thought were the most important and relevant. There might be a couple of multiple choice questions that mentioned a case …
Back in the veritable Stone Age of the 1980s, there was this thing called “toll” calls. Making a phone call from Parsippany to Whippany was free because it was a local call. Same with West Caldwell or Morristown. But if your call stretched a bit further, say to Metuchen, you were charged a fee for …
Continue reading “Punked after Getting My Phreak on with ARPANET”
Sunday – I continued to edit the Mock Trial video throughout much of the day, but guess what? I finally finished the sucker! It’s about 28 minutes long and has more little montage segments than I’ve ever done before, but with eight full trials plus some bonus footage, it seemed like the right time to …
Back on February 13, a group of sixteen students, Caryn Brogan, and I attended a program that examined the subject of segregation in the state of New Jersey. I first learned about the program back in October from my supervisor, Dr. Cynthia Assini, who serves on a statewide committee with the supervisor from Ridgewood, the …
Over the past decade I’ve developed an addiction to spending most of my summer enriching myself through professional development. The majority of my “time off” the last two summers was spent out of state in fellowships at museums and attending a variety of seminars. While I enjoy these excursions, it’s ultimately about improving myself as …
Continue reading “Paid to Sit Through 30 Days of Right-Wing Dogma”
In 2010, Gov. Chris Christie, as part of his crackdown of supposedly wasteful spending, capped sick day reimbursement at $15,000 upon retirement for municipal, county and school employees who had accrued a large number of sick days over the course of their career. I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to my retirement benefits …
I’ve been aware of Greg Gillette for much of the time that he has served on the Hillsborough Board of Education. On a great number of issues, we have been on opposite sides, and during some of the more unruly times, it’s quite possible that shouts from the audience directed at something he said as …
Sometimes teaching “both sides” is a crock, which requires one to bend over backwards to legitimize a ridiculous point of view. In years past I tried to teach the subject of tort reform as a completely unbiased presenter, but I realized over time that the framing of the issue around the proposal was in and …
My first home computer was a Sinclair ZX80, which we got most likely in 1980, or possibly 1981. This hilarious device: It had 1 KB of RAM. That’s not a typo. It used an awful membrane keyboard that was super difficult to type on. There was no internal hard drive (hahaha, hard drive) and no …
Continue reading “Hail to the Commodore, but not Barry this time…”
Fenster on Education