Haunting a new favorite place in the city, I found the above stenciled art a useful reminder about priorities and usage of time. As I type this, an ever-growing pile of articles and books teeters menacingly to my left. To my right, a stack of fellowship, grant, and conference forms & applications in varying states [...]
Fascinated by the fact that San Quentin State Prison is on Yelp. Though it looks like this started out as a snarky joke, I’m loving the re-appropriation of the space for conversation about prison conditions and tourist mentality. In some ways I think having students look at review sites like Yelp as sites of civic [...]
My dad would be 58 today. The influence that both of my parents had on shaping how I see the world and interact within it cannot be overstated. As I’ve spent much of this past year focused on schooling and teaching, it’s been useful for me to come up for air now and then and [...]
I’ve been thinking about surfing. I don’t, by the way. Surf, that is. I shy students away from the word “can’t” but invoke it when it comes to my ability in navigating water where I am unable to touch bottom. But the look in a surfer’s eyes. Brings to mind Freire’s “patient impatience.” One doesn’t [...]
Wires have been crossed and I’ve been making lapses in judgment. I find myself signing off letters with one name when I should be using another, for instance. Growing up as “Andy,” I acknowledged but never relied on my given name, “Antero.” Andy was simply the name I heard and used as I grew up. [...]
I think I’m trying to sneak around myself lately. I wonder if this is something I can elucidate in a way that sheds light on my wariness of academia in general. For starters, I should say that I’ve spent much of this quarter reflecting on how academic talk gets in the way of meaningful talk. [...]
Hadn’t been able to make it out to Machine Project in a while and thoroughly enjoyed tonight’s lecture about failure by Monochrom’s Johannes Grenzfurthner. Looking at how failure is a crucial component in negotiating success in the digital world and, along the way, highlighting the failure of the movie industry, the failure of Dubai, the [...]
I’ve been in serious Beatles mode lately. You can chalk it up to the full court press marketing effort behind the recent remasters and Rock Band if you’d like. In any case, as I have been re-listening through the discography, I’ve been drawn to some of the songwriting refrains that pop up now and then. [...]
Life is a series of stories. We are long unpredictable strands of narrative – here we intertwine and mesh, there we crosshatch and dither in little checks, we are not a uniform pattern or even a patchwork quilt. We are intersections that occasionally knot and collapse and move in dissonant trajectories. What do we tell [...]
Today my hall pass was taken away. This wouldn’t bother me so much except that – well – I kind of liked my hall pass. Maybe I should explain. About three weeks ago, sitting in a large faculty meeting, one of our school’s APs announced the implementation of a new hall pass. In order to [...]