Lester Smith works days as a writer & technologist for Sebranek Inc., an educational publisher in Wisconsin. In his spare time, he designs games, writes poetry & fiction, codes Web stuff, publishes other writers via Popcorn Press, & dreams of being the first Android Poet Laureate of Mars.
“Wait. Gimme a sec. I can probably think of a use for it.”
—Those wags at Woot.com
Now if there were only some way to deal with the tangle of electrical cords from all my countertop appliances!
In my early childhood, I was under the impression that “people are people.” I assumed one template for everyone, thinking that some individuals merely tried harder than others. (That made bullies, in particular, difficult to understand.) more »
Bullying is a fairly common topic in education nowadays. Frightened by the events at Columbine and such, many schools have set a zero-tolerance policy. The US Department of Health and Human Services has a Web site devoted to prevention of bullying. Experts from law enforcement and social work offer advice on how to deal with the problem.
That’s all great. I support it enthusiastically.
My purpose here, however, is to focus on “social bullying,” the threat of exclusion from a group, and ask, “What is it about human beings that leads them, within a social setting, to pick on the weak?” more »
Recently I met a young man who worked his way through college by cranking out research papers for an online term-paper store. The company sells “model” research papers, many made to order, so my young acquaintance might find himself writing about quantum mechanics one week and Stalin’s concentration camps the next. The job gave him lots of practice writing on short deadlines. He also picked up quite a bit of knowledge in many different fields. And of course, he got paid for helping someone else with more money than skill or discipline pass a course at some college.
He contributed to plagiarism, right? more »
Back in the early nineties, I taught English 101 for college freshmen for a couple of years. Besides covering the basics of composition and introducing students to the university library, English 101 was also supposed to present certain common topics of “scholarly discourse”—including gender issues and racial equality. more »