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Glenn Hervieux

Legal Clips » Federal district court in Mississippi rules school district did not violate student's free speech rights by disciplining for off-campus online post - 2 views

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    Fascinating and helpful abstract on a ruling on if schools can address students off-campus posting and discipline students without violating the student's First Amendment Rights
Bochi 23

Tablets or Laptops? Ask the Right Questions... - 125 views

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    Do you buy laptops or tablets? That's the wrong question... so, what's the right question?
Kate Tabor

Welcome to NBC Learn- Finishing The Dream: Learning From The Civil Rights Era - 35 views

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    60 years of the Civil Rights Movement - teacher resources
Daryl Bambic

Access to Knowledge as a Foundation for an Open World (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 9 views

  • The rights to be a creator, to govern and develop one's own knowledge, and to share with others are fundamental freedoms for the Internet age.
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    The rights to be a creator, to govern and develop one's own knowledge, and to share with others are fundamental freedoms for the Internet age.
Geoff Chamberlain

Video Games Win a Beachhead in the Classroom - NYTimes.com - 38 views

  • Go right! Go right! Go right!” the students were shouting. “Now down, down, down, downdowndown!” A few had lifted themselves onto their knees and were pounding invisible keyboards in front of them. “Whoa!” they yelled in unison, some of them instinctively ducking as Doyle’s sprite narrowly avoided a patrolling enemy.
  • Had he taught anything?
  • snap up more points and calmly offered a piece of advice. “That extra movement cost you some precious time, Al,” he said, sounding almost professorial. “There are more points up there than what you need to finish.
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  • watched a middle-school teacher named Al Doyle give a lesson, though not your typical lesson. This was New York City, a noncharter public school in an old building on a nondescript street near Gramercy Park, inside an ordinary room that looked a lot like all the other rooms around it, with fluor
Kimberly Vance

The Trouble with Black Boys - - by Pedro A. Noguera / Education Rights / In Motion Magazine - 0 views

  • The effects of growing up in poverty, particularly for children raised in socially isolated, economically depressed urban areas, warrants greater concern, especially given that one out of every three Black children is raised in a poor household.(20) Here the evidence is clear that the risks faced by children, particularly African American males, in terms of health, welfare, and education, are substantially greater.(21) A recent longitudinal study on the development of children whose mothers used drugs (particularly crack cocaine) during pregnancy found that when compared to children residing in similar neighborhoods from similar socio-economic backgrounds, the children in the sample showed no greater evidence of long term negative effects. This is not because the incidence of physical and cognitive problems among the sample was not high, but because it was equally high for the control group. The stunned researchers, who fully expected to observe noticeable differences between the two groups, were compelled to conclude that the harmful effects of living within an impoverished inner-city environment outweighed the damage inflicted by early exposure to drugs.(22)
    • Kimberly Vance
       
      This observational data seems to be confirmed by this study using EEG results - http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/12/02_cortex.shtml
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    The Trouble with Black Boys - - by Pedro A. Noguera / Education Rights / In Motion Magazine
Bill Graziadei, Ph.D. (aka Dr. G)

Which Kind of Collaboration Is Right for You? - 1 views

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    Free online business articles and news at Harvard Business Review. Read a preview of Which Kind of Collaboration Is Right for You?, by Gary P. Pisano, Roberto Verganti.
April Grybosky

Access to Water: A Human Right or a Human Need? - 0 views

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    Water a human right or a human need?
Cindy Sheets

Welcome to Aviary - 75 views

  • X Myna Audio Editor Use Myna to remix audio tracks and audio clips. Learn more Popular Myna Creations Open 2 days ago By Akuma296 Open 2 days ago By shyun17 Open 2 days ago By mizagorn in ... or watch a video demo first Close
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    This is SO awesome! I can't wait to try the tutorials and start making art! I'm definitely passing this one on to my students right away!
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    Free, web-based art and photo editing tool. Very cool looking.
Carol Mortensen

Audio Expert - free online audio editor, converter and recorder - 3 views

  • WELCOME AudioExpert is a free and simple online audio editor, file converter and sound recorder. All the standard functionality of an audio editor provides you with an easy way to create a ringtone for your cell phone. You will find AudioExpert useful also as a powerful audio file converter which will allow you to modify the file format of your files, their bit rate, frequency, etc. If your computer is equipped with a camera and microphone, you can use AudioExpert to record your sounds. Main Features: Make use of it to analyse audio files and extract detailed information about the format. Cut or crop audio files in just a few clicks. Merge multiple files into a single audio track. Convert files between all of the popular audio formats (WAV, MP3, OGG, M4A, AAC, FLAC, AU, AMR, WMA, MKA). Record audio off a microphone or another sound device and save it directly to WAV, MP3, WMA, OGG, etc. Convert multiple files at once by means of batch processing.
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    Convert, Edit (make ringtones), and merge audio files easily and quickly.
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    Create free ringtone!
Christine Schlitt

Lesson Plans: Name & Word Wall Activities, Building Blocks (Kindergarten, Building Blocks) - 32 views

  • Word Walls and The Name Game Each day we have one person who is our helper and we focus onher name. When everyone has had a turn, we start another round.I find it easiest to go in alphabetical order by first names. I write the students names on sentence strips, using one colorfor boys, and another for girls.First round: We reveal one name each day, beginning with a cheer:?Gimme a B (B), Gimme an i (i), Gimme an l (l), Gimme another l(l), Gimme a y (y). What?s that spell? (Billy). One more time!(Billy). Then I ask if anyone ?notices? anything about Billy?s name andwe look for letters in common with other names, or count lettersand look for other names with the same number of letters. Thenwe take a good look at the student, discussing colors ofclothing, so each child can draw a picture of the helper. Iwrite the helper?s name on the board and encourage everyone totry to write that person?s name and then draw a picture of thehelper. The helper gets to take home the pictures drawn byothers, his is put up on the bulletin board with the name cardI?ve made. 2nd Round: The self-portraits are put into a class book and thename cards are transferred to an alphabet word wall. Each day weread the alphabet and names, then take the helper?s name off tocheer and ?notice? letters about this name and others. We formthe helper?s name in magnetic letters, scramble them up and taketurns putting them in the right order. 3rd Round: When we read the alphabet, we say the sounds inaddition to the letters and names. This time we cheer, writethe letters in the helper?s name on the board and then count howmany of those letters are in the names on the word wall. Thenwe talk about which letter has the most, least, etc. We havealso added another name cheer: ?Bryan, Bryan, that?s his name.It starts with B, it ends with n, hooray, Bryan! We stillscramble the name with magnetic letters. At some point we begin to add sight words to the names on thewall, usually starting with go and we. In December, or after wecome back from Christmas, we take the names off the word walland put them in a pocket chart for the kids to use duringcenters. We continue to add sight words the rest of the year,reading the alphabet, and saying the sounds and words each day. Here are additional name ideas; some I?ve tried, some I haven?t.*Count the syllables.*Write the names like a rainbow.*Name poems from the website Korky?s Kool rhyme machine (http://www.literacyhour.co.uk/learning_activities/rhyme/rhyme.html)*Think of words that begin the same as the name.*Make up tongue twisters.*Fill out an interview sheet.*Mystery person (hangman type game where you draw blanks for theletters and the kids guess letters until they know the name.* Use the letters in the name and look for smaller words. *Cut up name puzzles to keep in a literacy center.*Change the initial consonant and play with the word (Sue, Bue,Lue, etc.).*Another name cheer: No matter what I do or say,My name will always be the same,It starts with_____It ends with ____Now count to 3 and say my name,1,2,3,_______.
    • Christine Schlitt
       
      Name Game Ideas for Kindergarten
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    "Word Walls and The Name Game Each day we have one person who is our helper and we focus on her name. When everyone has had a turn, we start another round. I find it easiest to go in alphabetical order by first names. I write the students names on sentence strips, using one color for boys, and another for girls. First round: We reveal one name each day, beginning with a cheer: ?Gimme a B (B), Gimme an i (i), Gimme an l (l), Gimme another l (l), Gimme a y (y). What?s that spell? (Billy). One more time! (Billy). Then I ask if anyone ?notices? anything about Billy?s name and we look for letters in common with other names, or count letters and look for other names with the same number of letters. Then we take a good look at the student, discussing colors of clothing, so each child can draw a picture of the helper. I write the helper?s name on the board and encourage everyone to try to write that person?s name and then draw a picture of the helper. The helper gets to take home the pictures drawn by others, his is put up on the bulletin board with the name card I?ve made. 2nd Round: The self-portraits are put into a class book and the name cards are transferred to an alphabet word wall. Each day we read the alphabet and names, then take the helper?s name off to cheer and ?notice? letters about this name and others. We form the helper?s name in magnetic letters, scramble them up and take turns putting them in the right order. 3rd Round: When we read the alphabet, we say the sounds in addition to the letters and names. This time we cheer, write the letters in the helper?s name on the board and then count how many of those letters are in the names on the word wall. Then we talk about which letter has the most, least, etc. We"
Paul McKean

educational-origami - Bloom's Digital Taxonomy - 145 views

  • This is an update to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy which attempts to account for the new behaviours and actions emerging as technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous.
  • Details last edit Oct 9, 2009 12:19 am by achurches - 56 revisions - locked Tags a churches blooms blooms digital taxonomy blooms revised taxonomy digital edorigami learning a churches blooms blooms digital taxonomy blooms revised taxonomy digital edorigami learning a churches blooms blooms digital taxonomy blooms revised taxonomy digital edorigami learning Type a tag name. Press comma or enter to add another. Cancel Table of Contents Synopsis: A little Disclaimer: Introduction and Background: Bloom's Domains of learning The Cognitive Domain - Bloom's Taxonomy Bloom's Revised Taxonomy Bloom's Revised Taxonomy Sub Categories Bloom's as a learning process. Is it important where you start? Must I start with remembering? Bloom's Digital Taxonomy Bloom's Digital Taxonomy Summary Map Bloom's Digital Taxonomy and Collaboration. Resources: Web 2.0 Tutorials Acknowledgements:This is the introduction to Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. The different taxonomical levels can be viewed individually via the navigation bar or below this introduction as embedded pages. Synopsis:  This is an update to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy which attempts to account for the new behaviours and actions emerging as technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous. Bloom's Revised Taxonomy accounts for many of the traditional c
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    This is an update to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy which attempts to account for the new behaviours and actions emerging as technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous.
Justin Medved

The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model | Magazine - 24 views

  • Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.
  • To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.
  • But what Demand has realized is that the Internet gets only half of the simplest economic formula right: It has the supply part down but ignores demand. Give a million monkeys a million WordPress accounts and you still might never get a seven-point tutorial on how to keep wasps away from a swimming pool. Yet that’s what people want to know.
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  • That’s not to say there isn’t any room for humans in Demand’s process. They just aren’t worth very much. First, a crowdsourced team of freelance “title proofers” turn the algorithm’s often awkward or nonsensical phrases into something people will understand: “How to make a church-pew breakfast nook,” for example, becomes “How to make a breakfast nook out of a church pew.” Approved headlines get fed into a password-protected section of Demand’s Web site called Demand Studios, where any Demand freelancer can see what jobs are available. It’s the online equivalent of day laborers waiting in front of Home Depot. Writers can typically select 10 articles at a time; videographers can hoard 40. Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort — because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work. The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip, paid weekly via PayPal. Demand also offers revenue sharing on some articles, though it can take months to reach even $15 in such payments. Other freelancers sign up for the chance to copyedit ($2.50 an article), fact-check ($1 an article), approve the quality of a film (25 to 50 cents a video), transcribe ($1 to $2 per video), or offer up their expertise to be quoted or filmed (free). Title proofers get 8 cents a headline. Coming soon: photographers and photo editors. So far, the company has paid out more than $17 million to Demand Studios workers; if the enterprise reaches Rosenblatt’s goal of producing 1 million pieces of content a month, the payouts could easily hit $200 million a year, less than a third of what The New York Times shells out in wages and benefits to produce its roughly 5,000 articles a month.
  • But once it was automated, every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas. So Rosenblatt got rid of the editors. Suddenly, profit on each piece was 20 to 25 times what it had been. It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula.
  • Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has since discovered: Online content is not worth very much. This may be a truism, but Rosenblatt has the hard, mathematical proof. It’s right there in black and white, in the Demand Media database — the lifetime value of every story, algorithmically derived, and very, very small. Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it — perhaps an impossible proposition — the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.
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    This is facinating!!!
SHARON DRESSEL

Coh-Metrix - 30 views

  • five major factors that account for most of the variance in texts across grade levels and text categories: word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, causal cohesion, and narrativity
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    Computer analyses of text characteristics are often used by reading teachers, researchers, and policy makers when selecting texts for students. The authors of this article identify components of language, discourse, and cognition that underlie traditional automated metrics of text difficulty and their new Coh-Metrix system. Coh-Metrix analyzes texts on multiple measures of language and discourse that are aligned with multilevel theoretical frameworks of comprehension. The authors discuss five major factors that account for most of the variance in texts across grade levels and text categories: word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, causal cohesion, and narrativity. They consider the importance of both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of texts for assigning the right text to the right student at the right time.
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    How do we go about selecting texts for individualized reading assistance? This sounds like a new way.
Maureen Greenbaum

L3D Philosophy - 36 views

  • uture is not out there to be "discovered": It has to be invented and designed.
  • Learning is a process of knowledge construction, not of knowledge recording or absorption. Learning is knowledge-dependent; people use their existing knowledge to construct new knowledge. Learning is highly tuned to the situation in which it takes place. Learning needs to account for distributed cognition requiring knowledge in the head to combined with knowledge in the world. Learning is affected as much by motivational issues as by cognitive issues.
  • previous notions of a divided lifetime-education followed by work-are no longer tenable.
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  • Professional activity has become so knowledge-intensive and fluid in content that learning has become an integral and inseparable part of "adult" work activities.
  • require educational tools and environments whose primary aim is to help cultivate the desire to learn and create, and not to simply communicate subject matter divorced from meaningful and personalized activity.
  • current uses of technology in education: it is used as an add-on to existing practices rather than a catalyst for fundamentally rethinking what education should be about in the next century
  • information technologies have been used to mechanize old ways of doing business‹rather than fundamentally rethinking the underlying work processes and promoting new ways to create artifacts and knowledge.
  • important challenge is that the ?ld basic skillsº such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, once acquired, were relevant for the duration of a human life; modern ?asic skillsº (tied to rapidly changing technologies) will change over time.
  • We need computational environments to support "new" frameworks for education such as lifelong learning, integration of working and learning, learning on demand, authentic problems, self-directed learning, information contextualized to the task at hand, (intrinsic) motivation, collaborative learning, and organizational learning.
  • Instructionist approaches are not changed by the fact that information is disseminated by an intelligent tutoring system.
  • Lifelong learning is a continuous engagement in acquiring and applying knowledge and skills in the context of authentic, self-directed problems.
  • ubstantial empirical evidence that the chief impediments to learning are not cognitive. It is not that students cannot learn; it is that they are not well motivated to learn.
  • Most of what any individual "knows" today is not in her or his head, but is out in the world (e.g., in other human heads or embedded in media).
  • technology should provide ways to "say the 'right' thing at the 'right' time in the 'right' way
  • challenge of whether we can create learning environments in which learners work hard, not because they have to, but because they want to. We need to alter the perception that serious learning has to be unpleasant rather than personally meaningful, empowering, engaging, and even fun.
  • making information relevant to the task at hand, providing challenges matched to current skills, creating communities (among peers, over the net), and providing access to real practitioners and experts.
  • What "basic skills" are required in a world in which occupational knowledge and skills become obsolete in years rather than decades?
  • reduce the gap between school and workplace learning
  • How can schools (which currently rely on closed-book exams, the solving of given problems, and so forth) be changed so that learners are prepared to function in environments requiring collaboration, creativity, problem framing, and distributed cognition?
  • problem solving in the real world includes problem framing calls into question the practice of asking students to solve mostly given problems.
  • teachers should see themselves not as truth-tellers and oracles, but as coaches, facilitators, learners, and mentors engaging with learners
sarwag

Newsela - Chrome Web Store - 26 views

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    Newsela is an easy, creative way to build reading comprehension with informational text that's always relevant through articles on current events. The beautiful thing about this innovative tool is that it allows you to take one article and differentiate it in up to five different lexile levels, which Newsela does by changing vocabulary and sentence structure. All of your students can read the same content at the level just right for them.
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    Newsela is an easy, creative way to build reading comprehension with informational text that's always relevant through articles on current events. The beautiful thing about this innovative tool is that it allows you to take one article and differentiate it in up to five different lexile levels, which Newsela does by changing vocabulary and sentence structure. All of your students can read the same content at the level just right for them.
Joe Hirsch

Is your team the right size? | Joe Hirsch - 8 views

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    Rule of thumb for right-sizing your team: Big enough to serve you, small enough to know you.
Gareth Jones

Looking in the Wrong Places | Edge.org - 5 views

  • We should be very careful in thinking about whether we’re working on the right problems. If we don’t, that ties into the problem that we don’t have experimental evidence that could move us forward. We're trying to develop theories that we use to find out which are good experiments to make, and these are the experiments that we build.   We build particle detectors and try to find dark matter; we build larger colliders in the hope of producing new particles; we shoot satellites into orbit and try to look back into the early universe, and we do that because we hope there’s something new to find there. We think there is because we have some idea from the theories that we’ve been working on that this would be something good to probe. If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.
  • I’m still asking myself the same question that I asked myself ten years ago: "What is going on in my community?" I work in the foundations of physics, and I see a lot of strange things happening there. When I look at the papers that are being published, many of them seem to be produced simply because papers have to be produced. They don’t move us forward in any significant way. I get the impression that people are working on them not so much because it’s what they’re interested in but because they have to produce outcomes in a short amount of time. They sit on short-term positions and have short-term contracts, and papers must be produced.
  • The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.
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  • That makes this field of science rather peculiar and probably explains why there hasn’t been much progress. But it’s not like we don’t have any questions that need to be answered. There are a lot of questions that have been around for decades. For example, what is dark energy? What is dark matter? What are the masses of the Standard Model particles? And what’s up with the foundation of quantum mechanics? Is a theory that's fundamentally not deterministic, where we cannot predict outcomes, the last word that we have, or is there something more to it? Is there maybe another underlying structure to reality?
  • but we haven't reached the fundamental level. Maybe we will never reach it. Certainly, the theories that we have right now are not all there is. The question is, of course, if we don’t have any guidance by experiment, how do we make progress? And are we doing the right thing?
  • We’ve reached this point where we have to carefully rethink if the criteria that we’re using to select our theories are promising at all. If one looks at the history of this field in the foundations of physics, progress has usually been made by looking at questions that, at least in hindsight, were well posed, where there was an actual mathematical contradiction. For example, special relativity is incompatible with Newtonian gravity. If you try to resolve this incompatibility, you get general relativity.
  • There are various similar examples where such breakthroughs have happened because there was a real problem. There was an inconsistency and people had to resolve it. It had nothing to do with beauty. Maybe beauty was, in some cases, the personal motivation of the people to work on it. There’s certainly some truth to this, but I don’t think it’s good to turn this story around and say that if we only pay attention to this motivation that comes from ideals of beauty it will lead to progress.
  • If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.
  • The way that research is funded in foundations of physics and in many other fields just puts a lot of things at a disadvantage that are not pursued anymore. Typically, everything that takes longer than three years to complete, no one will start it because they can’t afford it. They can literally not afford it.
  • Who makes the decisions about the funding? Superficially, people say that it's a funding agency, so it’s the university who get to hire people. But that puts the blame on the wrong party. In the end it’s the community itself who makes the decisions. What do the funding agencies do if they get a proposal? They send it to reviewers. And who are the reviewers? They're people from the same community. If you look at how hiring decisions are being made, there’s some committee and they are people from the same community. They have some advisory boards or something, which contains people from the same community.
  • Even if that wasn’t so, what the people in these committees would be doing is looking at easy measures for scientific success. Presently, the most popular of these measures are the number of publications and the number of citations. And maybe also whether the person has published in high-impact journals. So, these are the typical measures that are presently being used. But what do they measure? They primarily measure popularity. They indicate whether somebody’s research is well received by a lot of people in the same community. And that’s why once a research area grows beyond a certain critical mass, you have sufficiently many people who tell each other that what they’re doing is the good thing to do. They review each other’s papers and say that that’s great and it's what we should continue to do. It’s a problem in all communities that grow beyond a certain size.
  • I later came to the United States and then Canada, and that gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about quantum gravity. I also figured out that much of what goes on in quantum gravity is very detached from reality. It’s pretty much only mathematics. Yes, the mathematics is there, but I still don’t know if it’s the mathematics that describes reality.
  • That’s the very reason why we don’t normally think of gravity as a weak force. It’s the only force that is left over on long distances, and the reason for this is that it adds up. It gets stronger the more mass you pile up. More precisely, we should say that the reason we find it so hard to measure quantum gravitational effects is that we either have a particle that has very pronounced quantum properties, like, say, a single electron or something like that, but then it’s so light that we cannot measure the gravitational field. Or we have some object that is so heavy that we can measure the gravitational field, but then it doesn’t have quantum properties. Okay, so that’s the actual problem.
tthomasuscu

Gun Culture Is My Culture. And I Fear for What It Has Become. - The New York Times - 15 views

    • tthomasuscu
       
      Very clear imagery. He opens the essay with his personal anecdote to set the scene for this discussion. It also lets the reader know right away that he is a gun owner.
  • What I was doing was perfectly legal. In North Carolina, long-gun transfers by private sellers require no background checks.
    • tthomasuscu
       
      Should this be changed to prevent criminals from buying guns from private sellers? How is something this dangerous allowed to take place?
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  • so long as the buyer has a purchase permit or a concealed-carry license.
  • I felt uneasy
  • He liked the rifle. I needed the cash. We shook hands, and off we went.
  • There is rarely a moment when I’m not within reach of a firearm.
  • We don’t touch the guns or draw them from their holsters. They are unseen and unspoken of, but always there.
  • Rarely do we mention what we carry
  • I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew the rules: Always assume a firearm is loaded. Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Know your target and what’s beyond it.
  • Guns were often a bridge between father and son.
  • or my family, guns had always been a means of putting food on the table. My father never owned a handgun. He kept nothing for home defense.
  • had a gun put to my head
  • I can remember that
  • steel
  • I can remember
  • In the end, what happened was swept under the rug. My parents said the school was probably trying to keep the story off the news.
  • surrounded myself with the people I did as a form of protection.
  • I dropped to the ground as gunfire rang from a car at a bonfire party.
  • I pushed friends behind the brick foundation of a house as a shootout erupted over pills. There were times when someone could have easily been shot and killed.
  • his service weapon pushed into the base of my skull.
  • I stood there trembling while they apologized.
  • Jackson County
  • I found a community that reminded me of my grandmother, where folks still kept big gardens and canned the vegetables they grew. They still filled the freezer with meat taken by rod and rifle — trout and turkey, dove and rabbit, deer, bear, anything in season.
  • hared passion for wilderness and time spent in the field with gun in hand.
  • Those types of things are rare now, even in places like Appalachia.
  • A few weeks later, the boy took that .30-30 lever action into the field and killed his first deer with it — the same as his uncle, his grandfather and great-grandfather.
  • centuries of experience gathered around the campfire each night
  • the .308 blew apart the morning.
  • There is a sadness that only hunters know, a moment when lament overshadows any desire for celebration
  • Life is sustained by death
  • the killing is not easy, nor should it be.
  • would feed me for a year
  • I asked if there was anything I could’ve done differently to make him more comfortable when he first approached the truck.
  • He smiled and told me: “But this is South Carolina. Most every car I pull over has a gun.”
  • As I headed toward the mountains, all I could think about was Philando Castile,
  • situation was re
  • All I could think about was how things might have been different if the
  • versed and that young black state trooper with braces had been behind the wheel, a white trooper cautiously approaching the car.
  • It was impossible not to recognize how gun culture reeks of privilege.
  • Ruger 10/22s and Marlin Model 60s, the .22LRs
    • tthomasuscu
       
      This guy knows his guns. Even though his essay doesn't cite research, you can see his ethos through his personal experience and his use of precise jargon.
  • There were always guns, but nothing like the assault weapons that line the shelves today.
  • firearms whose sole purpose would be to take human life if I were left with no other choice.
  • I’ve witnessed how quickly a moment can turn to a matter of life and death. I live in a region where 911 calls might not bring blue lights for an hour. Whether it’s preparation or paranoia, I plan for worst-case scenarios and trust no one but myself for my survival.
  • they joke about the minute hand of the doomsday clock inching closer to midnight.
  • as they wait for the end of the world.
  • they own them because they’re fun at the range and affordable to shoot. They use the rifles for punching paper, a few for shooting coyotes. E
  • step as close to Title II of the federal Gun Control Act as legally possible without the red tape and paperwork. They fire bullets into Tannerite targets that blow pumpkins into the sky.
  • None of them see a connection between the weapons they own and the shootings at Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland. They see mug shots of James Holmes, Omar Mateen, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz — “crazier than a shithouse rat,” they say. “If it hadn’t been that rifle, he’d have done it with something else.”
    • tthomasuscu
       
      Where is the fault in this logic? It just doesn't add up.
  • They fear that what starts as an assault-weapons ban will snowball into an attack on everything in the safe.
  • I understand what’s at stake
  • I think about that boy picking up that AR in Cabela’s, and I’m torn between the culture I grew up with and how that culture has devolved.
  • changes I know must come, changes to what types of firearms line the shelves and to the background checks and ownership requirements needed to carry one out the door.
  • an unrelenting fear of what could be lost
  • a subsistence culture already threatened by the loss of public land, rising costs and a widening rural-urban divide; the right of individuals to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.
  • He cut a look in my direction as if I’d absolutely lost my mind.
  • I’d be fine with an assault-weapons ban
  • question is irrelevant, that the reason doesn’t supersede the right.
  • Despite everything we have in common, despite the fact that he’s my best friend and we were going squirrel hunting in a few days, the two of us fundamentally disagree
  • As sad as it is to say, the silence is easier
  • there were kids on the television in the background, high school survivors who were willing to say what we are not, and I was ashamed.
  • ne of those pretty, late-winter days with bluebird skies when the trees are still naked on the mountains and you can see every shadow and contour of the landscape.
  • The muzzle was pointed in our direction. Ashley was terrified.
  • The truth is, there are guns I feel justified in owning and guns I feel belong on battlefields.
  • I know that part of what they’re missing or refusing to acknowledge is how fear ushered in this shift in gun culture over the past two decades.
  • Fear is the factor no one wants to address — fear of criminals, fear of terrorists, fear of the government’s turning tyrannical and, perhaps more than anything else, fear of one another.
  • I recognize this, because I recognize my own and I recognize that despite all I know and believe I can’t seem to overcome it.
  • I don’t buy into that only-way-to-stop-a-bad-guy-with-a-gun-is-a-good-guy-with-a-gun bravado.
  • I have no visions of being a hero. Instead, I find myself looking for where I’d run, asking myself what I would get behind. The gun is the last resort. It’s the final option when all else is exhausted.
  • we walked, I could feel the pistol holstered on my side, the weight of my gun tugging at my belt. The fear was lessened by knowing that there was a round chambered, that all it would take is the downward push of a safety and the short pull of a trigger for that bullet to breathe. I felt safer knowing that gun was there.
    • tthomasuscu
       
      How does fear drive so many of us to distrust and hate our fellow Americans? How does the Gun Lobby and the NRA use this fear to their advantage? What role does fear play in racial prejudice? How do we combat and address this fear?
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