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 readingAuthor: Marie Snyder
A 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
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Gertz’s Nihilism
A year after coming out with Nihilism and Technology, Dr. Nolen Gertz wrote just plain Nihilism, an “examination of the meaning of meaninglessness: why it matters that nothing matters.” It’s a really short book, but it took a while to wade through it all. Here it all is even more briefly
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: 2020 Year in Review: Teaching Under the Banner of Covid
Dr. Jennifer Kwan put out a call on Twitter for messages we wished to have sent ourselves a year ago. Then she added, And Ryan Imgrund, provider of daily stats and graphs, added, Many wise people were prescient but unheard. And it’s still happening. We have lots of excellent information
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Hedges on American Psychosis
Chris Hedges just put out a short video about American Psychosis, in which he explains, We have blissfully checked out. Most people have no concept of how fragile their environment is. . . . There’s an emotional incapacity to understand collapse, even when it’s facing you. I have covered, as
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Cuties, Euphoria, and Promising Young Woman
My social media feed is full of political scandals that I have no ability to affect, so I’ve immersed myself in movies and shows. Bechdel test for the win for this trio! Film both reflects and affects society, like all forms of art but even more than most as it’s
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Ten Climate Change Items That Need Wider Reporting
Out of the frying pan, into the fire. A vaccine is here, hooray! But now let’s actually take a good hard look at climate change mitigation. This is from a thread of threads on Twitter by climate activist Ben See (9 min video from a year ago). We can’t prevent a
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Unforeseen Custody Issues: Who Could Have Predicted THIS?
I’m generally a worrier. If my kids don’t text back after a few minutes, all sorts of images bombard my brain. Sometimes they don’t text back for hours, and it always ends up being because they were sleeping or – back in the good old days – at a movie
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Hannah Arendt in Lego
@EthicsInBricks posted this lovely tribute to Hannah Arendt on Twitter last October, in honour of her date of birth, October 14, 1906, and I want to save it in the month of her death 45 years ago, so here’s the thread all nicely cited: (Read more…)“The ideal subject of totalitarian
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: How Is Hybrid Teaching Going?? It’s Complicated.
We’ve recently been told that next semester, starting in February, will operate the same way as this semester did: running quadmester terms with in-school students attached to each school in a hybrid model with a rotation of half at home and half in the classroom, and online students being taught
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Mental Illness in Covid Times
For me to stop teaching in a physical classroom, because I don’t feel safe in there, I need a note from my doctor indicating that I have a mental illness that prevents me from working and then take a sick leave. It can’t just be a note that says I
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Another
I had a very sick kid here on the night before the last day of the last quadmester. My little one felt shaky and dizzy and came downstairs to get the pulse oximeter because they felt so faint. They promptly barfed in the kitchen sink. Of course it was full
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Critical Race Theory
Conservative British MP, Kemi Badenoch, insisted that Critical Race Theory is somehow illegal, so I’m just going to save this rebuttal here: This is a Twitter thread from Kojo Koram – @KojoKoram – professor of law Birkbeck: “A thread on the new bogeyman of “critical race theory”: Kemi Badenoch. Watching
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Michael Sandel’s Tyranny of Merit
I haven’t yet read his newest book, but Michael Sandel is everywhere these days promoting his new book. An excerpt from a Guardian interview: Sandel charts the rise of what he sees as a corrosive leftwing individualism: “The solution to problems of globalisation and inequality – and we heard this
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Imagine If Teachers Made the Decisions that Affect Teachers
So now the government has overruled regulation 274. I wrote about it ages ago, again firmly planted on the government side!! I’m really very, very pro-union, honestly, but some things just don’t make sense to me. At the time, I was watching several LTO teachers in my building who knew
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Does Teaching Effectively Legitimize Ford’s Plan?
What Doug Ford’s team is doing right now reminds me of Bojack Horseman, from the end of the first season on, when absolutely everybody just starts saying “Hollywoo” after the ‘D’ in the big sign goes missing. It becomes the accepted reality. So many are openly just accepting that kids and
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Putting Your Own Mask on First
Teachers are a hardy bunch. We have self-trained ourselves to remain polite and calm in the face of abuse. On my first day of teaching, ever, I wrote Miss Snyder on the board, and a faceless voice from the back of the room said, “Oh good, she’s not married. No
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