I ride past a freshly plowed empty field and see a large corrugated fence that advertises the latest neophyte tagging crew in sloppy, choppy letters. I don’t know what is the worst of these aesthetic crimes – the graffiti on the walls or the fact that it is so cheaply done, with such dull black letters that they blend in with the ...

After reading a recent blog, suggesting that teachers should self-censor and stay politically inactive, I feel compelled to write this blog.  Telling teachers to shut up and focus on their classrooms is like telling Martin Luther King Jr to shut up and preach or Schindler to shut up and run a factory.  The truth is that, if we want to ...

Students are swept up into the whirlwind of the AIMS test - a grueling twelve hour marathon where they will be transformed from students into data on pretty graphs in Excel sheets.  We're not in Kansas in more. (Honestly, we never were.  We live in Phoenix, home of the traffic cone, the brown cloud and a sea of mundane tract housing) ...

It is a show which lives up to its name, embodying nearly every form of America's idolatry.  Yet, we scoop it up by the handful - the thirst for fame, the worship of celebrity, the cult of stardom, the sex, the lights, the music, the commercialism and the Coca-Cola.  We listen to the sage advice of the three great high priest, one of ...

I first read Catch 22 as a cynical high school student.  Something about the wry humor, the absurdity of the system and the feeling that I was surrounded by insanity resonated well with Mountain Ridge High.  I enjoyed the lively characters, though I never felt any real emotional connection to them.  So, I'm reading it now ten ...