WILLIAMMORGAN.NET

It’s a beautiful day but also a bit of a blah Monday. Lots of causes—end of a fabulous weekend, annoying politics on Facebook, painfully sad e-mail from the parent of a kind student, frustration of entering a mound of 0% scores due to missing papers. But it’s also due to a book I read yesterday [...]

So here’s an easy one that isn’t hardly worth the time: Did you ever notice that Fox News isn’t quite as “Fair and Balanced” or as committed to “We Report. You Decide” as they claim?
First of all I should say that I have nothing against biased news. I teach my students that a biased news [...]

I broke down and headed to downtown Columbia for the 3rd annual Roots ‘N Blues ‘N BBQ Festival. Last year was one of the best times I have had in Columbia, but I chalked that up to a perfect set of circumstances—weather, mood of the kids, good friends, great kid-friendly location right next to the [...]

I read an interesting article at TheAmericanScholar.org called “The Decline of the English Department” and I sadly found myself cheering along a bit. The big picture is this: from 1970 to 2003, English as a college major dropped from from 7.6 percent of all majors to 3.9 percent.
Now I do have a two questions about [...]

Time for some filler. I usually get halfway finished with a post and a kid needs some juice or something. Every once in a while you need to take out the garbage. This randomness comes from last week:

What’s with Facebook fights? Everyone has to spawn their political cheap shots and I’d can’t avoid pointing out [...]

Molly is working on an interesting science experiment. (Sociology? Musicology? Geography?) I made her a Grateful Dead MP3 disc for her car that contains about 12 hours of classic Dead. Unlike me, Molly appears to put a disc in the CD player, press shuffle, and let it ride for a few weeks.
That worked fine until [...]

So one thing I’m not real cool with is small kids cussing. I don’t have a problem with foul language—in the right hands it can be a bit of an art form—but I’m really picky with my kids (both my real kids at home and my “kids” at school). Maybe it’s from this weird 1979 [...]

For no reason at all, the twelve non-religious texts that make me cower in awe, aware that I’m in the presence of a mind vastly greater than my own:

Aeschylus, Agamemnon (458 BC)
Virgil, Georgics (29 BC)
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (1321)
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605)
John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (1842)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the [...]

You know what makes me queasy? Prosperity gospel. I was reading an article today where a pastor was claiming that he was rich because God wanted him to be rich. Of course he skipped the corollary, that poor people are poor because God wants them to be poor. (Don’t want to bite the hand that [...]

So the main story on all the news sites today deals with the Taxpayers’ March on Washington, and I’m struck by how incoherent the message is. I’m not sure I’d ever attend a major march because the ideas tend to get mixed in ways that don’t make sense. You’re always left scratching your head and [...]