About
I started this blog in May 2010 as a celebration of leaving academia, and for about a year I made fun of how out of touch, hierarchical, and sadomasochistic higher ed was, much to the delight of others in the field.
When you leave a field, everyone expects you to say “Oh, the job just wasn’t right for me…” but no, some jobs just suck and right now, teaching is one of them. Most people running higher ed wouldn’t recognize a normal American if one sat on their face. Meanwhile, normal Americans think that book learnin’ is for pansies and French people. (This is what happens when you put education on an ivory pedestal.) Teachers at all levels are stuck in the middle, dealing with students who behave like wild dogs and parents who refuse to admit it’s their fault because they’ve seen Stand And Deliver a few times, darn it, and they just know it’s a teacher’s job to fix everything.
Because I was telling the truth about education, people started treating this as a ‘serious’ education blog. I’m happy to speak for people who can’t — and you can’t, if you’re a educator and want to keep your job — but after a while, I started to feel compelled to follow the latest education news, which was exactly what I was trying to avoid.
So I talk about education when I feel like it (i.e. when non-teachers say stupid stuff about it) but I don’t necessarily have an opinion on every educational matter. As a genuine lifelong learner, I don’t think education should be its own subject anyway (see above re: pedestal). So who knows, I may talk about Family Guy, or Plato, or business philosophy, or the latest movie I’ve seen, or some web design I’m working on, or my thoughts on how to write a good joke. I overspecialized for twelve years and it sucked a lot. I don’t want to be pigeonholed again.
Nobody puts baby in a corner.