“Study the faces of the new tyrants,” Berger says has he begins the last section of his book, Bento’s Sketchbook: How Does the Impulse to Draw Something Begin? What follows is a series of incisive descriptions: They are impeccably dressed and their tailoring is reassuring, like the silhouette of high-security delivery vans. They have foreheads…

One of the writers who has befriended me through her words is Naomi Shihab Nye. We have never met, though I imagine being in San Antonio sometime and knocking on her door as though we are both used to my doing that and having her answer and inviting me in for tamales and poetry. One…

Not long after we moved into our school building last year, Borders went broke and sold everything in their stores including the fixtures. The tables in my room are the very ones that held stacks of books for customers’ perusal and my walls are lined with the book shelves that made corridors of what are…

Durham is the most encouraging place I have ever lived. This is a city full of people who pull for each other, which is good because it’s also a city full of people with dreams and things they want to see happen. In our town of about a quarter of a million people we had…

sometime in the night I will be robbed of an hour of sleep in order that we might save daylight the thieves will leave nothing butthe promise the hour will be savedkept safely and returned in the fall still — what if this was the nightI was to sleep deep enough to wake truly rested…

A couple of nights ago, I posted what has come to be known as the Kony 2012 Video as my blog post. I learned of it through my eleventh graders. One of them was in a documentary studies class I taught last year in which we watched “Ghosts of Rwanda,” a Frontline piece looking at…

“The difference betweenjoy and despair,” she said,“has little to do with circumstances and everything to do withwhat you choose to see.” “You’re making that up,”he replied. She took his facebetween her handsand stared into his eyesas if they held galaxies.“I love you,” she said,“with all of my heart.” And he believed her. Peace,Milton

I don’t want you to read today. Watch instead. Then do something: Kony 2012. Peace,Milton

Twice, today, I got to feel like a teacher. My school is understaffed, which means I teach a couple of courses out of my area. OK, out of the six classes I teach (out of six periods of the day), four of them are not English. My schedule, this term, looks like this: Period One:…

One of the joys of teaching English is vocabulary study. Every week or two, I turn the page to a new list of words for my students – expunge, bequeath, cogent, supercilious – and then put them through the paces of the exercises that come in their books hoping that a few of the words…