

Every Little Thing Dee Does Is Magic
A joint commentary on Magic featuring The Police. Blerkins' contributions in italics. Though I've tried before to tell her
Of the feelings I have for her in my heart
Every time that I come near her
I just lose my nerve
As I've done from the start I didn’t lose my nerve. This year marks our 21st Anniversary, 28th of friendship. I knew the very day she crashed our Sunday School class. Purple and white flowered Southern-belle sundress with faux buttons. Flowing red locks, ba


Classroom Blogging - Unlimited Shelf Space
Classroom Blogging: A Teacher's Guide to Blogs, Wikis, & Other Tools that are Shaping a new Information Landscape (2nd ed.) by David F. Warlick. Blogging is not new. It turns out that the basic rhetoric which is exhibited by blogs has been seen before in the West – namely, in the writing of pamphlets. Pamphlet writing was big in the 18th century, and was favored especially by America's Founders. Short tracts which presented a particular viewpoint or argument on a relatively n


Classroom Blogging - "Learning Literacy"
Classroom Blogging: A Teacher's Guide to Blogs, Wikis, & Other Tools that are Shaping a new Information Landscape (2nd ed.) by David F. Warlick. Although I have experimented with a little blogging in my classroom over the years, this spring is the first time that I have been systematic about using it to facilitate a whole unit of study. Specifically, we set up a classroom blog with student sub-blogs over at Kidblog, and I have had students blogging their way through their out

BOOK BLOG | The Other Six Deadly Sins: Gluttony (Sayers - Letter 10)
“Gluttony is warm-hearted. It is the excess and perversion of that free, careless, and generous mood that desires to enjoy life and to see others enjoy it. But like lust and wrath, it is a headless, heedless sin, that puts the good-natured person at the mercy of the cold head and the cold heart; and these exploit it and bring it to judgment…” GLUTTONY (gula) – Next in Sayers’ exposition of The Other Six Deadly Sins is gluttony, the third (and last) of the warm-hearted sins, w


Offeratory Decay
Every few Sundays, the praise band at our church has a Mannheim Steamroller moment. Now, anyone who knows me, knows that I am a total musical snob and have a hard time keeping a proper perspective on these things. (Actually, I think my view is the proper one, but I struggle to balance that against a society which has been out of step with it for most of the last half-century.) Anything that falls below the standard of, say, Handel or Beethoven, is, in my view, failing to live

BOOK BLOG | The Other Six Deadly Sins: Wrath (Sayers - Letter 9)
“The good soldier is on the whole remarkable both for severity in his measures and for measure in his severity. He is as bloodthirsty as his duty requires him to be, and, as a rule, not more.” WRATH (ira) – Sayers turns her attention next to wrath, the second of the Seven Deadly Sins. Like lust, wrath is a warm-hearted sin, bubbling up suddenly, irrationally, and brutally. It brings in its wake destruction. Just as one is inspired by one’s lusts to act lustily, wrath tends to