Pat’s Polemics

We’re at only lesson 9, 10 meetings total, of my granddaughter’s French lessons. She has total comprehension of sentences like Le pirate dirige le bateau (Continue Reading)

The events since Wednesday night have rocked the country. Let me first just recount them and then muse on the speed of change we’re seeing. (Continue Reading)

I’ve hit upon another way to make sure I post daily: just copy my posts into the blog under whatever category seems appropriate. The problem (Continue Reading)

Finally, for the fifth time, I’m starting regular postings. It’s still going to take me time to organize the blog. I want to start with (Continue Reading)

The only way I’m going to get traffic on my blog is to blog every day. Even in retirement, I’ve found that difficult. Earlier I (Continue Reading)

Watching television over the years, we notice how t.v. executives try to spot trends and jump on them. They may start trends but usually they (Continue Reading)

Someone told me about a record store on Adams in Phoenix. I went there and discovered Sandy’s Records, a cultural oasis in late 50s Phoenix, (Continue Reading)

So many thoughts run through my head, every time I read a paragraph, new ones pop into it. Today was highly emotional but the prognosis (Continue Reading)

Listening to Scott’s story of Barack Obama’s mother and having read a little of it, I am reminded a tiny bit of my own mother. (Continue Reading)

More to add to the Rambles. I just started yesterday a new book, You Are What You Speak. The author, a journalist, looks to be (Continue Reading)

As the school year winds down, I’m looking forward to devoting more time to this blog. I’d hoped to blog daily on lesson plans but (Continue Reading)

Maybe I can finally get this thing off the ground. I want to enter at least one item a day, skipping around a bit. I (Continue Reading)

I wonder if anyone else has noticed this about themselves. Hundreds of times, I have picked up something I had been reading and started at (Continue Reading)

Here I sit, teetering but confident. I am looking forward to seeing what happens to the GOP, how Obama handles the new if not unpredictable (Continue Reading)

The difficulty of “getting to” things like blog tasks must be overcome. Just now I pulled a bookmark out of a book accidentally, losing a (Continue Reading)

Stealing from Stephen Krashen’s newsletter, I want to point out that it is just this sort of detective work that yields so much truth. He (Continue Reading)

This appeared on a Latin listserv:    We’re up to 4590 signatures to help save Classics, Italian, French, and Russian at SUNY Albany. If you (Continue Reading)

I’m at that point where so many things have buzzed through my mind that I don’t have the time to organize them into coherent posts. (Continue Reading)

Lots of things to cover. This weekend I hope to post a lot of entries to the blog. Daily activities and lesson plans – an (Continue Reading)

Is there any disinterested party who can tell us just what the AP consisits of? Two things I’ve had contact with: The Latin AP has (Continue Reading)

I see stupidity everywhere. On the Urdu listserv they lamented the fact that students of Hindi and students of Urdu at Berkely U. of C. (Continue Reading)

A work in progress, to be edited later………. Even though a possible literary allusion in the words “idiot robots” has been revealed that would soften (Continue Reading)