After conversing with a friend on social media, I told him I would recommend some readings that would lean into the reasons for the current protests after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. I have included my recommendations below in two segments: •My Top 15 — Placed in an order that I thought was…
Back on March 13th, 2020 we all left school. I remember that day. It was Friday the 13th. It was the day I walked out and reasoned that it was possible I might not be back during the school year to teach in my classroom. We all left that day thinking that we’d perhaps be…
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne is the central character in the novel The Scarlet Letter. For those of you less-familiar with this story, Prynne is accused of committing the sin of adultery and required to wear a scarlet letter “A” on her outer clothing as a mark of shame. Dr. Seuss employed a similar labelling scheme in…
Those N95 masks we all hear about, the ones that were hoarded and often resold for multiples of their previous price, likely aren’t enough to stop COVID19 from finding your nasal and bronchial passages. This also means that regular medical masks and definitely ones made from simple cloth won’t stop invasion either. Just this morning,…
“The Surabaya was a large steel box taking away his memories, devouring them” says Nobel Prize-Winning Author JMG LeClezio in his novel Onitsha. Boxes really are just simple containers. They hold things, separate them, sort them. A box has sides to it. Sometimes the sides are shapable, malleable — cardboard or paper-like material that can be pushed…
Spinning, spinning, spinning, twirling, twirling, speeding across the waves, the foam swallowing in a gulp at the beach. Chomp, chomp go the waves and the bubbles hiss as they fry against the sand. Regardless of temperature, the water has been shoved and forced powerfully to the shore and the sand must bear the weight and…
On a normal day in a normal way, madness would define itself as something so outside of experience that we can’t register it as part of our normality. An outlier. Something that happens to someone else. Something beyond comprehension and needing immediate attention. Something dangerous, crazy, impossible to interpret. Yet here we all are, sitting…
I have compiled here, to the best of my ability at this time, a list you must follow this weekend as you occupy your dwelling: 1.) Get a good night’s sleep. 2.) Eat well. 3.) Stay away from other people, especially those who are ill. 4.) Watch boring TV. 5.) Read — Oh, got you…
At the corner of Stockton and Wessel stands the greatest monument to white people in the city of Angelo. The tall white spire of the steeple extends high into the blue sky. People who visit say that spire reaches into the heavens and allows God a direct ladder to the sanctuary. In the sanctuary, sculpted…
What’s it like to look out into the world and see nothing? To see nothing but confusion? To see a maze of possibilities all intertwined and crawling like ants, one over the other, each blocking the other’s view? Where hope is a four-letter word that is impossible to reach? Where it is imperative that impulse…
In my daily life wanderings, I read frequently. Sometimes I cross a sentence or series of sentences that really catch me and make me think. My mind likes to build those bridges between past texts and current applications. Yesterday, I was reading Richard Dawkin’s book Science In The Soul. In the collection, the article titled “The…
Oh Wall Street, the darling of our wallets and pursues. The train to somewhere better that we envision yet can’t quite see. The world of the mostly intangible with a little tangible sprinkled in. Today’s hit to Wall Street was overwhelming. To see the circuit breaker tripped within the first minute of trading tells us…
About eight years ago, all of us witnessed the beginning of a trend toward e-reading. The idea was if we put books and material on screens rather than paper, the younger generation would literally read constantly. At least that’s what people thought would happen. Instead, we never saw that race to literature and reading among…
I wish. I wish we could all congregate in Times Square and cheer as the crystal ball slides down toward Earth. I wish we could see the sparkling lights, go to a show on Broadway, have a meal unlike any other with friends. I wish we could all be together. But we are not. We…
Just Thursday, I was alerted that my school would be closing for the next four weeks. Two of those weeks are regular school weeks that we’ll conduct e-learning and two weeks are the already-scheduled spring break. Looking into the distance, that’s four straight weeks of being closed in with my immediate family and operating day…
Pearce Writing 