When I was a kid, my folks said I was a little slow to warm up to people and sometimes needed a nudge to interact. Then, in grade 11, we all had to do this really long test, filling in stacks of Scantron-type cards with our answers, which were fed
Continue readingAuthor: Marie Snyder
A Puff of Absurdity: Next Steps: Violence? Policy? Adaptation? Acceptance?
Ezra Klein wrote a compelling piece about Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. We’re not doing enough to stop the trainwreck we’re driving, but is violence the answer? “Decades of climate activism have gotten millions of people into the streets but they haven’t turned the tide on
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Wolff on Generating Allies
Whenever I read or listen to Noam Chomsky or Chris Hedges talk about citizens changing the world like they did in the 30s, I get equally riled to action and then paralyzed by ignorance of how ever to begin. A recent discussion by Richard Wolff offers a bigger hint about
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: MacKinnon’s Call to Stop Shopping
J.B. MacKinnon co-wrote the 100-Mile Diet years ago, which was a good read. It didn’t have much effect on my eating because it was a bit too extreme for even me, but it DID affect my awareness of where I get produce from. For his most recent book, he compiled
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Timothy Snyder on the War on History
In “The War on History was a War on Democracy,” Snyder compares Russian memory laws, which we’re quick to recognize as propaganda, to American under Trump: By March 1932, hundreds of thousands of people were already starving to death in Soviet Ukraine, the breadbasket of the country. Rapid industrialization was
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Future of the Left with Natalie and Noam
I stumbled across a video of Natalie Wynn in conversation with flippin’ Noam Chomsky. They are two of my favourite thinkers, but I never, in my wildest imagination, would have expected to find them chatting together. Noam seems to be everywhere these days, doing one talk after another, and Natalie
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Paranoid or Prescient? Does it matter?
It’s interesting to me when people make fun of anyone taking what they perceive as undue precautions. There are two general reasons for precautions that seem unreasonable: #1 a lack of education or understanding on the part of the viewer and #2 a means to cope with stress on the
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Unpopular Opinions: On Failing Credits, Teaching Hybrid, and Grading Student Work!
Riding on my high that a post-covid education system could be different, I joined a committee. It quickly killed by buzz with a reminder that bureaucracy will only allow choices between a very narrow range of options. But I also appear to be in the minority of teachers on many ideas
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Kolbert’s Under a White Sky
It’s World Environment Day (who knew?!), and the Independent published a collection of hopeful messages despite the world not being on track to keep temperatures below two degrees this century. Some are pinning cautious optimism on youth climate movements. Others are hopeful that this time, at COP26, things might be different since
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Post-Covid Educational Reform
I try to restrain any excitement that bubbles up over the prospect that education will be different when all this ends, assuming it will end. Teachers have suddenly had to learn how to teach in radically different ways, and some of that is gold! But I’m pretty sure we’ll end up
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist
Nearing the end of my two-week long prep period at the END of a year that slayed me with back-to-back senior courses, and I’m finally getting caught up on my reading! Just on Friday, Vancouver police were looking for a 40-year-old suspect, and arrested an 81-year-old Black man who happened
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Got a Better Idea?
When I was little, my parents told me never to complain unless I have a better idea or a solution that can work. They likely did that to stop me from complaining so much, but it’s actually pretty good advice. I was thinking about that watching the news about the
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Michael Mann’s New Climate War
It’s not all that new. There are tons of books on this topic now, so it would be hard to find a completely new angel. But the public still needs to learn the basics, and Mann does a good enough job of explaining it all in a very conversational writing
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Safe Schools in September – Second Try
Last September, despite all the science to the contrary, school boards opened schools with “mask breaks” built in to the mornings rather than have a shorter day and let the kids go home for lunch. I left my windows open an inch, and kids complained about the cold. And then
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Michael Sandel’s Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
This excellent read, The Tyranny of Merit, by Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel, actually shifted some of my thinking, and I love a good lightbulb moment provoked by a book! I found the book sometimes a little outside my reach in places enough to need to read a few chapters
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Interview with the Guelph Back-Grounder: On Teaching Critical Thinking
In early February, just before immersing myself into the current quad of online teaching, a friend of a friend interviewed me for a local independent journal. I thought it would be all about teaching during a pandemic, but together we meandering through a diverse chain of topics for about 90
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: World Autism Day
I’ve come up for air from this crazy year of teaching for World Autism Day – and I’m a day late. Many autistic people find April an awkward time because much of the messaging around autism comes from non-autistics. Miss Luna Rose made this great graphic to illustrate some of
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Stop the Lucrative Cruelty in Yemen
There was an online rally with some impressive speeches about the war on Yemen today, What Yanis Varoufakis referred as a form of “lucrative cruelty.” Here’s the full video and below are some of the words I found most impactful. Biden was there when it stared in 2015, a unilateral attack by
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Freedom at Any Cost
I believe it’s not a coincidence that the UK, US, and much of Canada – the trio that promoted neoliberal free market politics – are not doing enough to restrict the spread of Covid. The rightwing in our countries (and some centre and left players) still act on the dogmatic
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Painting for Community
I did these fun little puzzle pieces as part of a local community initiative, “Belonging Together,” with the aim of an ever-expanding mural from people across the region. I based all mine on photos from my neighbourhood. It’s likely the last creative thing I’ll do for fun before diving into
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