Last week I went on a vacation trip to Tennessee with my parents, Allen and Pat, and their closest friends, Ron and Lil. It’s been a few years since I traveled with my family, and I enjoyed the honor of tagging along with their foursome. We had a lot of […]
Category: Sidetrails
Inspired by an Olympic Victory
[Trigger warning] As news of the Jerry Sandusky scandal broke last fall and Penn State students rallied in support of their football coach, one brave young woman decided to step out and be a voice for the victims of sexual abuse. She was totally disgusted by a culture in which […]
More Power
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t having any.” – Alice Walker Author of The Color Purple In my previous post, I wrote about women and power—how sometimes women don’t have as much as we would like and how important it is […]
Putting Power in Its Place
I work at the University of Virginia, and today saw the resolution of a power struggle that, for better or worse, pitted the university’s first female president against its first female rector. It got me thinking about power and women. For the better part of human history, power has resided […]
Teaching is listening, Learning is …
How would you finish this sentence? Educator Deborah Meier says that learning is talking. In other words, real learning comes from being actively involved in the educational moment. Learners are not empty banks in which to deposit information. Searching, thinking, questioning, debating, and applying are all active aspects of learning. […]