Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

19 Feb 2002, 8:11 a.m.

I'm reading Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and…

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

I'm reading Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. Enjoyable and thought-provoking.

So now I have over a year of my life here in my journal at this website. I started back in December 2000 and I'm glad. Thanks to Seth and Leonard for inspiring me.

Adam and Leonard visited me yesterday. I attempted to make lunch. Tip: beans need soaking overnight before they can transform into food. Take note!

We played Scrabble and I had a great stroke of luck the very first turn, using up all my letters with UNIFORM, but Leonard later achieved SULFITES. Hey, is TA really a word?

Great quotes via Postman and Weingartner:

Ernest Hemingway: "In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector."
Father John Culkin: "A lot of things have happened in [the twentieth] century, and most of them plug into walls."
Jerome Frank: Up until about 1920, almost the whole history of medicine is the history of the placebo effect.