Dressed for a Funeral
When I lived in Minnesota, I belonged to an award-winning chorus. We staged three major productions a year, and performed at smaller venues in various capacities, as well. The chorus was a marvelous experience overall. Curiously, it was also one of the most socioeconomically diverse groups I had belonged to since high school. For one [...]
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On Height
I am 5' 11 1/2" tall without shoes. But since you’re probably not going to see me without shoes, I usually just say I’m six feet even. When I’m sitting, I look even taller, about 6' 3", because I am all torso with short legs. In other words, I’m tall -- taller than the typical [...]
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On Being an American
I’ll be honest. I’m not much of a patriot, and I never really have been. As a child, I would put on the English accent I learned from BBC rebroadcasts and fool random strangers into thinking I was visiting from London. While on a high-school trip to Toronto, I took great pride in the overheard [...]
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What I Taught and What I Learned
There’s an ugly trend nowadays whereby teachers write mean-spirited blog posts and splashy click-bait articles that lambaste their students for not knowing things. They may feel justified because they’re anonymizing their students, but there’s still something dreadfully wrong with this fad. If you’re a teacher, it’s your job to teach the students what they don’t [...]
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On Terminology
I may have given some readers pause with my debut article. They would be savvy to the fact that the term “intersectionality” was coined by black feminists to describe a phenomenon distinct from and more complicated than white feminism, to point out that white women enjoyed privileges that women of other races did not. They [...]
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