Jane Haddam

I have gotten to that point in Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life that’s good for me to read because it reminds me that nothing is new, especially in American education policy. And looked at this way, as part of a continuous history rather than a phenomenon of the last few decades, it occurs to…

What I intended to do on the blog today was to finish the #bookadaychallenge–to do the second half of the month.  I’ve been sick for a week and I’m still very draggy today, and I thought it would be an easier and gentler way of doing the blog when what I really want to do…

Every once in a while I get into these odd states where I feel as if I don’t have anything to say, but I want to write anyway.  Except that that isn’t really it.  It’s more like I have something to say, and I don’t know if it’s very important.   Or if it relates to…

Here’s where we are. I started to feel a little ill in a summer cold/maybe flu kind of way on Saturday, and I thought it would be over in no time. Instead, it’s been getting worse and worse, and today I feel as if I’ve been hit by a Mack truck. And then it backed…

Let me start with this: if you don’t understand the reference in this post’s title, you should go immediately and watch Blazing Saddles.   If you have never seen Blazing Saddles, there is something profound missing from your American experience. Beyond that, I have a few introductory remarks. This is a post about how we argue…

So here it is on Sunday, which is, as some of you kn0w, supposed to be my official Day of Rest. Instead, I worked this morning, meaning I wrote things, and now I’ve got Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata going on behind my head. Beethoven on early Sunday mornings is always something of an ambiguous sign.   I…

So, a few people sent me this http://chronicle.com/article/The-Miseducation-of-America/147227   this morning, and it’s not surprising, because I’m always interested in there is Gloom and Doom in American Higher Education.   And after that, I just feel stymied.  A man is coming out from New York tomorrow to interview me for a rather more important magazine…

Before I start this, I should note that I have now spent more than ten hours trying to figure out how to write this post,  and I haven’t really come to any defined approach yet. In some ways, I find it hard to figure out what I want to say about what happened.   In other…

My relationship to music is, I think, a little odd.  Or maybe just a little odd for me. If you’ve ever read this blog before, you know that I am a person who tends to…what’s the word?…intellectualize stuff. In fact, I tend to intellectualize almost everything. That “almost” in the preceding sentence exists mostly because…

This morning I learned a new word–emphyteutic, as in “an emphyteutic lease.” I learned it because I looked it up, stopping my day at the beginning to hit the dictionary when a short paragraph I was reading hit me with the thing, and I couldn’t remember ever having seen it before. An emphyteutic lease is…