Growing up in a border town, California in the 1950’s was the best of times—and a time of great awakenings for all of us country folks as well as the nation. The town of my youth, El Centro, was a thriving hub of California’s agriculture that was often referred to as “The winter salad bowl.” …
Not for me a garden of dreams. Instead mine rip into my delicate brain sac, tear its membranes as though it were a placenta. These dreams, after a decade of being knocked out by heavy duty sedatives, anti-psychotics, basically an arsenal of lethal, at times, tempting, alluring, let’s just do me in drugs. Now dreams …
=I have an English-Chinese electronic dictionary. It’s as small as a lady’s powder box but contains English vocabulary and expressions as comprehensive as a cumbersome hardbound Oxford dictionary. I thank the inventor of the electronic dictionary for bringing immeasurable convenience to me. In fact, almost every Chinese, Korean and Japanese student that I’ve met on …
There is today much hypothesizing about how to train teachers. In my three decades in the classroom, I have supervised student teachers from a variety of universities. I am certain that the qualities, which enable this career, at least in part are found in erudition, skill and emotional discernment. Regardless of how teacher education is …
Since I’ve been in America for a year, I am no longer considered a newcomer. I am supposed to know the society better, at least deeper, than a year ago. But if you ask me whether I am used to my American life, I’d say I am still adjusting. A year ago, I had no …
8 AM In order to save money, the school district is making bestial layoffs. About one out of every four of the teachers will be fired by sundown. Or so the rumor goes. To deal with our anxieties, several schools of thought have developed. Schools within this school, as it were. On my third …
I’ve been trying to learn to write plays. It’s a craft, I know, not only an art. I’ve heard it said by someone in the theater that writing a play is like plumbing. I understood her to mean that things have to be connected up right or you have a spontaneous overflow of something you …
There was a shoot-out — and I mean like a full gansta shoot-out — up the street at 6:30 AM. Twenty or thirty or more shots fired. It happened in the parking lot of the A.M.E. church. The smell of cordite lingered for half an hour. Sirens, sergeants and paddy-wagons for an hour. Ghetto birds, police helicopters, off and on for two hours. Now, …