Swing and a Miss

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor died on Friday. This essay regarding her influence on American educational standards originally ran on May 12, 2011, but today it may be more timely than ever. Specific temporal references (e.g., “seven or eight years ago,” “last week,” “the current”) remain the same as in the original post. […]

Drawing the Line Somewhere, Part 2

(This post is the second in a two-part series. I adapted it from a keynote address I delivered in the summer of 2010 at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vermont, where I teach in the MFA Writing program. The essay is part of a collection of talks by Goddard writing faculty that have been collected in […]