Children: How will they ever know who they are? The question is the last line of “The Things we Steal from Children” by Dr. John Edwards. You can read the whole below. I found it via Leading and Learning – a blog and website from New Zealand that I have long found valuable. In a different time and context William …
Wisdom and inspiration from Emily Dickinson: The gleam of an heroic Act Such strange illumination The Possible’s slow fuse is lit By the Imagination
On the last day of the year, time to show an affirming flame as another low dishonest decade ends. I’ll leave all the best and worst and top ten lists to others, but merely remark – that for all the base mendacity in the real world, life in school remains a place of joy and possibility. The words and phrases…
We asked the captain what course of action he proposed to take toward a beast so large, so terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to answer, and then said judiciously, “I think I shall praise it.” Robert Haas. Epigraph to his second book of poems, Praise: 1979 If you work in a school you get two chances at a new year. …
Every year at the annual Eagle Society poetry reading a lower school student demonstrates that s/he has spent homework time memorizing Shel Silversteins’s twelve line epic that begins: Homework, oh homework I hate you, you stink. I wish I could wash you away in the sink. If only a bomb would explode you to bits, Homework oh homework you’re giving…
What’s the difference between a metaphor and lying? With a president who reads Derek Walcott and quotes June Jordan it’s good to have comedians at home with T.S.Eliot. This week inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander explained metaphor to Stephen on The Colbert Report. Get More: Comedy Central,Funny Videos,Funny TV Shows Meanwhile at PDS English teachers had a quick email conversation that…
PDS marked the inauguration at its Peacemakers Assembly on Tuesday. Entitled “Stony the road we trod” the event began with the singing of James Weldon Johnson’s Lift Every Voice and Sing. In the collage you can see pictures of the participants from high school to lower school. Ater lunch everyone returned to the JEJ theater to watch the inauguration.
PDS has new science laboratories. Time for a poem from the Czech poet-scientist Miroslav Holub. In the Microscope Here too are the dreaming landscapes, lunar, derelict. Here too are the masses, tillers of the soil. And cells, fighters who lay down their lives for a song. Here too are cemeteries, fame and snow. And I hear the murmuring, the revolt…
Suddenly there’s Poughkeepsie what a hard time the Hudson River has had trying to get to the sea it seemed easy enough to rise out of Tear of the Cloud and tumble and jumps draining a swamp here and and other smaller longings for the wide except for its spelling ocean sixty miles away is that town every day and…
The poet Robin Becker visited PDS and talked with students from the poetry elective and high school literary magazine. She read poems from three of her collections including the most recent Domain of Perfect Affection. Here is former poet laureate Robert Pinsky commenting of one of the poems – OK Tucker -in the Washington Post
When the night winds whistle through the trees and blow the crisp brown leaves a-crackling down, When the autumn moon is big and yellow-orange and round, When old Jack Frost is sparkling on the ground, It’s Thanksgiving Time! – from Thanksgiving Time by Langston Hughes I hope your holiday is wonderful.
The title and content of this entry have changed. The original title – A Challenge to Stephen Colbert – referred to the Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report where the grippy and relentless megamerican Stephen Colbert holds court. The show opens with dramatic graphics of eagles, waving flags and the swooping adjectives that Colbert proclaims for himself. Lincolnish and flagaphile have…
Several recent news stories have bemoaned what every email user already knows – spam is on the march and filling up the inbox. There is a spam arms race going on and the spammers are currently winning. “It will only end when people stop buying diet pills, herbal highs and sexual performance enhancers,” said Dave Rand, of Internet security firm…