Bob Collins
Here’s a reminder that people who don’t get anywhere near enough attention are often the ones who make the biggest difference.
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MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Education
A Twitter hashtag is aimed at a woman who tried to make a Supreme Court case about her racial victimization.
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Michael Vaudreuil, 54, lost it all in the economic meltdown of 2008. His business collapsed and he was out of a job and would soon be out of money if he hadn’t taken a part-time gig as a janitor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. Read more →
Chong Lee, of Wausau, Wis., lost his arm when he was just a boy when mortar shells rained down on his backyard in Laos in 1968.
After years in a refugee camp, his family migrated to Wisconsin, he learned to speak English, and for the last few years he’s worked as a janitor at Wausau East High School.
He has a prosthetic arm, but it’s too heavy and uncomfortable, so he works with just one arm. Read more →
The celestial calendar tells us today is the first day of summer but we really don’t need it to know that spring is giving way to a new season; we just have to keep an eye peeled for the complaints about applause as commencement ceremonies. Read more →
For the first time since 2009, Clown Camp, which made La Crosse somewhat internationally famous in the clown community, is back in town, the La Crosse Tribune says. Read more →
Michael Thomas, the interim superintendent of Minneapolis Public Schools, did the incoming permanent superintendent a huge favor when he cleaned up the mess created by the system’s human resources department, who moved to fire a teacher who was arrested while monitoring the arrest of a black man last month. Read more →
A teacher at Washburn High in Minneapolis was threated with being fired because she stopped to monitor the arrest of an African American man by Minneapolis police and then was arrested for obstructing justice. Read more →
The growing chorus against passion increasingly seems like the logical follow-up to the campaign against education in the form of anti-intellectualism and ‘elitism.’ Read more →
here’s quite a brouhaha in North Dakota because the interim president of a university made a political endorsement, igniting a debate over whether the heads of academic institutions should be involved in partisan politics. Read more →
A St. Cloud lawyer wants Minnesota’s two U.S. senators to get behind a push that would allow student loan debt to be wiped out in bankruptcy. Read more →
Austin Hancock, who opened fire in a school cafeteria of an Ohio junior-senior high school in February, was sentenced yesterday to six years in the Ohio Department of Youth Services. He’s 15. He’ll be released when he’s 21. Read more →
Worcester Polytechnic Institute attorneys argue the victim engaged in risky behavior, including excessive drinking, on the night that a security guard at her university-leased apartment building lured her to the roof and attacked her. Read more →
No doubt some people will note that Bill Boegeman, a social studies teacher from Minneapolis, has a luxury few other people have — a summer off. That’s often how people dismiss the perspective that teachers occasionally provide to us about what it’s like to be a teacher. As if one negates the other. Read more →
He warmed up the crowd with the usual actor-turned-commencement-speaker stuff, and then took a flamethrower to the political and financial class. Read more →