The stories that a nation tells about its history provide a foundation for building community, creating institutions and transmitting values. For a pluralistic democracy such as the United States, the work that historians call "constructing a usable past" is vital to the task of building a future.

It was her face that communicated, “Look you old fart I don’t have time for all this yack-yack; tell me what to do. Let’s end this tedious conversation as soon as possible. I have a life. I do not want to prolong the veneer of pretending to share a part of mine with you.” The woman had a pseudo smile that was neither friendly nor inviting. Somehow I have crossed over into the undesirable zone. I was explaining a concept to a person approximately 30 years younger than myself. I looked at her face. The woman was more than bored, she was pissed.

Teach For America, an organization that puts its recruits through fast-track training to teach in U.S. regions where students have fallen behind in academic achievement, is now recruiting for its 20th cohort of new teachers.  It's not surprising, then, that TFA recently has received extra scrutiny in the U.S. press. The verdict is still out on the effectiveness of the program—it depends, really, on how you measure effectiveness—yet it's still sending thousands of teachers into U.S. schools each year.

Caitlin Flanagan's venomous attack on school garden programs -- and Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard Program in particular -- in the Atlantic piece Cultivating Failure has been a hot-button topic of discussion all week.

I have been known to drift to sleep with my media player filled with episodes of science and speculative fiction podcasts. I do confess that in between the twilight and the snoozing I’m picky about what I put into my brain. You’d think I’d seek out boring speakers to help me sleep but my mind does not like the idea of forced ennui.

A few years ago, a family member (I'll call her Wanda) was principal of a middle school. "Jane," a sixth-grader, asked her to mediate a conversation between her and her best friend, "Maria." Wanda thought this was a very mature suggestion, so she brought both girls into her office. "Maria," Wanda said, "Jane tells me she would like to discuss a recent misunderstanding." Jane nodded, then said, "I didn't really go down on your boyfriend."

Today, I began my Seminar on College Teaching by having the grad students and postdocs enrolled in it draw a picture that served as a metaphor for higher education today. Images of violence figured prominently in a few doodles. My students depicted the research university as a guillotine, a hunting lodge filled with trophy heads, and--perhaps most graphically--as a meat grinder into which students are fed like cheap steak destined to be hamburger.

Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education is getting a lot of attention from the White House and from private industry. As a non-parent, I really do have a stake STEM education. On the surface it seems like a good idea to invest $250 million dollars, since most of it is coming from Intel. Why should I care? The most basic reason? My own safety and survival.

The last few years (OK, decades and really centuries, maybe even millenia) have been challenging ones for women fighting for equal rights. Gail Gauthier at Original Content speculated with a friend that "feminism has gone down the toilet" in recent years. In the Western world, we've been called Nazis, elitists, racists, intellectuals, classists, man-haters, lesbians, witches, and all sorts of other names. (All are true at times except the first slur, which infuriates me to no end.) But a post written by Zachary Mason, a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, which struck me as earnest if not naive, got me thinking about the importance of toilets to women, and what bathroom facilities mean in strict gendered societies.

According to a recent news report, Kevin Li is an accomplished high school student who thinks the leadership and management experience he got from editing his school paper is more important for his future career than the fact that he aced his AP biology exam. Despite that (or perhaps because of it), he says his parents might not pay for college if he majors in journalism. 

Black men have long been overdiagnosed with schizophrenia, according to a new book by University of Michigan psychiatry and women's studies professor Jonathan Metzl.  The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease suggests that black men are diagnosed with schizophrenia at a rate at least five times higher than any other group, a practice that likely began when "experts" made a connection between blackness, civil rights activism, and mental illness.  Metzl's finding is consistent with earlier findings of psychiatric overdiagnoses of people of color and women.

Trash strewn throughout neighborhoods, young men uprooting stop signs, people peeing in front yards, drunken brawls, people breaking into strangers' homes and falling asleep there, men punching pizza delivery drivers, and women vandalizing police cars.  No, it's not Skid Row, a gang-infested community, or a post-apocalyptic landscape.  Rather, it's 1 a.m. in a relatively upscale professorial neighborhood of State College, Pennsylvania.  The National Public Radio show This American Life recently profiled the city and Pennsylvania State University, which was recently ranked the #1 "party school" by the Princeton Review.