It is easy to be confused about whether it’s safe to resume in-person instruction. Schools in Europe, which were quick to reopen a few months ago, are closed now due to a resurgence of COVID-19. Experts, including the new head of the CDC, say it’s safe to reopen, even if teachers have not been vaccinated.

Steven Singer does not agree. From the onset of the pandemic, he has worried about reopening too soon. Now he wants to know why Dr. Rochelle Walensky says it is not safe to go to a Super Bowl party, but safe to reopen schools without vaccinating teachers. He says Dr. Walensky is engaged in magical thinking. He asks: Why are schools safer than Super Bowl parties?

Mercedes Schneider deconstructs a report by the Journal of the American Medical Association that has been widely misunderstood as a blanket endorsement of full-time in-person instruction. She pulls…

The Seattle Seven and two of their attorneys in summer 1970, photographer unknown

“The Seattle Liberation Front, or SLF, was a radical anti-Vietnam War movement, based in Seattle, Washington, in the United States. The group, founded by the University of Washington visiting philosophy professor and political activist Michael Lerner, carried out its protest activities from 1970 to 1971. The most famous members of the SLF were the ‘Seattle Seven,’ who were charged with ‘conspiracy to incite a riot‘ in the wake of a violent protest at a courthouse. The members of the Seattle Seven were Lerner, Michael Abeles, Jeff Dowd, Joe Kelly, Susan Stern, Roger Lippman and Charles Marshall III. After the nationwide organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) disintegrated in 1969, Michael Lerner, an instructor newly arrived in Seattle from Berkeley, California…

Daniel Nyikos was born in Germany into a U.S. military family. His mother is Hungarian and his father is an American of Hungarian descent. The family moved a lot during his early school years, mostly in America and the Netherlands. His poetry has been featured in Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column, “American Life in Poetry.”

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To read Daniel Nyikos’ poem, “Potato Soup,” click here:

Kaleidoscope, April 26-May 9, 1969

“In the 1960s, investigative journalists, poets, novelists, political activists, community organizers, and artists formed an unprecedented alliance for change in the vigorous underground press movement that flourished in the United States. This network of counterculture, campus, and other alternative media brought larger political issues into communities, awakening citizens to their own power to influence national policy. Surprisingly, the rapid growth in the number of underground newspapers and readership was mirrored by a sudden, equally rapid, decline in the early 1970s. The fate of the underground press followed that of the Movement, in general. The end of that great incubator of dissent, the Vietnam War, and the dismantling of the draft reduced the sense of immediacy felt by many people. Disagreements over strategy and goals fragmented the nascent New Left. While alternative journals belonging to the older traditions of muckraking, Left political commentary and party papers…

“In the summer of 1968, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — known at the time as Lew Alcindor, and just barely twenty-one years old — was already a basketball legend. Impossibly tall and incredibly talented, he had led New York City’s Power Academy to 71 straight wins before joining John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins. After a year on the ‘freshman team,’ he had led the varsity to back-to-back NCAA titles, winning tournament MVP both times (he would add another title and MVP in 1969). And that summer, if you were a kid growing up in one of the New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) developments, you could meet the legend in person. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar could probably have been anywhere he wanted in the summer of 1968. Many people had expected — indeed, had demanded — that he would lead the United States to Olympic glory on the basketball court, but he declined the tryout

“A musical movement born in the industrial North of England, the Northern Soul phenomenon grew out of club-goers passion for black American dance music. It morphed eventually into a craze for rare (and by extension, very expensive) records, and even lionised some quirky artists and even quirkier records. Eventually, the scene spread way beyond the North and, as many experts will tell you, many of the records could not accurately be described as ‘soul‘. The Northern Soul culture was (and is) the most nitpicky, touchy, elitist and purist music scene ever – rent with divisions over best versions, best clubs, best trousers and, at the very heart of it, what actually constitutes Northern Soul. Odd really, when you consider that the records themselves may comprise the most inclusive, accessible, joyous canon of popular music ever . . . The term ‘Northern Soul’ was first coined by a music…

In Austria, today is Street Children’s Day, but there are street children everywhere. If children really are our future, then every child should have enough to eat, a safe place to sleep, clothes that fit and protect from the weather, and a school where they can learn something more than how to get through just one more day.

Octavio Paz(1914-1998) was born in Mexico City. He wrote many volumes of poetry, as well as a prolific body of remarkable works of nonfiction on subjects as varied as poetics, literary and art criticism, politics, culture, and Mexican history. He was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1977, the Cervantes Prize in 1981, and the Neustadt Prize in 1982. He received the German Peace Prize for his political work, and finally, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.

To read the poem “The Street” by Octavio Paz, click

Good Morning!

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Welcome toTheCoffeeShop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

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“I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?”

– Langston Hughes, from ‘Tired’

Betsy DeVos made the goal of school choice clear: Shift public dollars away from public schools and transfer them to privately managed charter schools, online schools, for-profit schools, home schools, and vouchers for religious schools. She never supported public schools. Her actions emboldened her followers in Red States to make a full frontal attack on public education. Please share this information on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Alert your friends and colleagues. The attack on public education rolls on, despite the overwhelming evidence that charter schools do not get better results than public schools unless they cherrypick their students, and voucher schools get worse results, while most avoid accountability and transparency.

The Red State governors want to fund failure, instead of adequately and equitably funding their most important responsibility: the public schools.

In this article, Carol Burris–with research assistance of Anthony Cody and Marla Kilfoyle–of the Network for Public…

Andrea Gabor has written recently about the importance of civics education. She has reminded us that the obsession with standardized testing has robbed students of the joy of learning and consumed time that could be better spent in other ways.

The 22-year-old Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, who spoke so beautifully at the inauguration of President Joe Biden, reminded her that we have lost the study of poetry in our mad Race to Leave No Child Behind and to force testing on every student and teacher.

I heartily agree with Gabor. I have always loved poetry. I edited two collections that included many iconic poems: The American Reader and The English Reader (with my son Michael). During a time when I was grieving the loss of a child, I read poetry and found solace in a poem by Ben Jonson. When my children were young, we read poetry together, and they…