Bob Shepherd, author, editor, assessment developer, story-teller, and teacher, read a book that he loved. He hopes—and I hope—that you will love it too.
He writes:
Like much of Europe between 1939 and 1945, education in the United States, at every level, is now under occupation. The occupation is led by Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation and abetted by countless collaborators like those paid by Gates to create the puerile and failed Common Core (which was not core—that is, central, key, or foundational—and was common only in the sense of being vulgar. The bean counting under the occupation via its demonstrably invalid, pseudoscientific testing regime has made of schooling in the U.S. a diminished thing, with debased and devolved test preppy curricula (teaching materials) and pedagogy (teaching methods).
In the midst of this, Gayle Greene, a renowned Shakespeare scholar and Professor Emerita at Scripps University, has engaged in some delightful bomb throwing for the Resistance. Her weapon? A new book called Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm.
OK. Maybe I’ve pushed the occupation/resistance metaphor to the edge of its usefulness. Let’s try another. If Gates’s test-and-punish movement, ludicrously called “Education Reform,” is a metastasizing cancer on our educational system, and it is, then Professor Greene’s book is a prescription for how to reverse course and then practice prevention to end the stultification of education and keep it from coming back. The book is a full-throated defense of the Liberal Arts and of traditional, humane, in-person, discussion-based education in a time when Liberal Arts schools and programs are being more than decimated, are being damned-near destroyed by bean counters and champions of ed tech. Here’s the beauty and value of this book: contra the “Reformers,” Greene details the extraordinary benefits of the broad, liberal educations that built in the United States people capable of creating the most powerful, vibrant, and diverse economy in history. She makes the case (I know. It’s bizarre that one would have to) for not taking a wrecking ball to what has worked. And best of all, she does so not at some high level of abstraction, but backs up any generalizations with concrete, vivid, fascinating, moving, delightful examples from her classrooms. How do you build a world-class human? Well, you give him or her the benefits of a broad, humane, liberal arts education that confers judgment, wisdom, vision, and generosity. Greene shows us, from her own classes over three decades, exactly how that happens.
And she shows us how, under the “standards”-and-testing occupation, all that is being lost.
Years ago, I knew a fellow who retired after a lucrative, successful career. But a couple months later, he was back at his old job. I asked him why he had decided not simply to enjoy his retirement. He certainly had the money to do so.
“Well, Bob,” he said, “there’s only so much playing solitaire one can do.”
I found this answer depressing. I wondered if it were the case that over the years, the fellow had given so much time to work that when he no longer had that to occupy him, he was bored to tears. Had he not built up the internal resources he needed to keep himself happy and engaged ON HIS OWN? Greene quotes, in her book, Judith Shapiro, former president of Barnard College, saying, “You want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.” The French novelist Honoré de Balzac put it this way: “The cultured man is never bored.” Humane learning leads to engagement with ideas and with the world, to fulfillment, to flourishing over a lifetime, to what the ancient Greeks calledeudaimonia—wellness of spirit. Kinda important, that.
In a time when Gates and his minions, including his impressive collection of political and bureaucratic action figures and bobble-head dolls, are arguing that colleges should become worker factories and do away with programs and requirements not directly related to particular jobs, it turns out that the people happiest in their jobs are ones with well-rounded liberal arts educations, and are the ones who are best at what they do. And it turns out that people taught how to read and think and communicate and be creative and flexible, people who gain a broad base of knowledge of sciences, history, mathematics, arts, literature, and philosophy, are self-directed learners who can figure out what they need to know in a particular situation and acquire that knowledge. Philosophy students turn out to be great lawyers, doctors, politicians, and political operatives. Traditional liberal arts instruction creates intrinsically motivated people.
All this and more about the value of liberal arts education Professor Greene makes abundantly clear, and she does so in prose that is sometimes witty, sometimes hilarious, sometimes annoyed, sometimes incredulous (as in, “I can’t believe I even have to protest this shit”); always engaging, human and humane, compassionate, wise, authentic/real; and often profound. As much memoir as polemic, the book is a delight to read in addition to being important politically and culturally.
Gates and his ilk, little men with big money to throw around, look at the liberal arts and don’t see any immediate application to, say, writing code in Python or figuring out how many pallets per hour a warehouse can move. What could possibly be the value of reading Gilgamesh and Lear? Well, what one encounters in these is the familiar in the unfamiliar. As I have said numerous times elsewhere, all real learning is unlearning. You have to step through the wardrobe or fall down the rabbit hole or pass through the portal in the space/time continuum to a place beyond your interpellations, beyond the collective fantasies that go by the name of common sense. Real learning requires a period of estrangement from the familiar. You return to find the ordinary transmuted and wondrous and replete with possibility. You become a flexible, creative thinker. You see the world anew, as on the first day of creation, as though for the first time. Vietnam Veterans would often say, “You wouldn’t know because you weren’t there, man.” Well, people who haven’t had those experiences via liberal arts educations don’t know this because they haven’t been there, man.
Gayle Greene has spent a lifetime, Maria Sabina-like, guiding young people through such experiences. Her classroom trip reports alone are worth your time and the modest price of this book. At one point, Professor Greene rifs on the meaning of the word bounty. This is a book by a bounteous mind/spirit about the bountifulness of her beloved liberal arts. Go ahead. Buy it. Treat yourself.
I’m midway through the book– and having precisely the same experience.
Her “bomb-throwing” commentary is spot-on, but I also love the in-depth look at facilitating a seminar with college students, pulling out ideas, then turning them over to see if they’re truths or misconceptions. We should all be teaching like Greene: suggesting, challenging, questioning, providing context, laughing. In every subject and at every developmental level.
Highly recommended.
Her recountings of class interactions are so much fun! And one thing I love about them is that they aren’t faked. Greene is fiercely (and hilariously) honest. This is what swapping stories in the teachers’ lounge is like when the other teachers in the lounge are sensitive and brilliant (which, in my experience, is pretty darned often).
And Greene also gives a masterclass on doing complex reading. Willie S. and I are old buddies, but I learned a few new perspectives from this book. It’s a joy to be a fly on the wall in her classes!
And he’s oh, so good
And he’s oh, so fine
And he’s oh, so healthy
In his body and his mind
He’s a well respected man about town
Doing the best things so conservatively
The Kinks – Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues (Ray Davies 2022 Mix) [Official Lyric Video] (youtube.com)
I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me
All is groovey.
Excellent comments! Yes, let’s continue with real–liberal, thinking, analogue education. After all, eventually robots can think digitally and faster than we can. They may even be trained at some point to think in a way that mirrors analogue. But they’ll never be people. Up with people!
Thanks, Jack!
Sy Montgomery told us how to be a good creature. Can’t wait to read this book.
Of course I will have to. Wait, that is. I have waited more than any other activity in my life. Humans always have this experience. That is the preside reason we need good liberal arts learning. It brings definition to our wait.
How to Be A Good Creature – Sy Montgomery
Good afternoon Diane and everyone,
I’m looking forward to reading this book. When you’ve finished this one, I suggest Iain McGilchrist’s beautiful book The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World for a broader perspective on the issue of why the liberal arts are taking a beating. 🙂
This just gives you a little taste:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/03/resist-the-machine-apocalypse
It’s shocking to me that the liberal left will believe anything and everything Gates says, but when it comes to educational endeavors. In my experience, anything this man conjures up, the opposite should be believed or followed. He is a narcissistic nut that needs to completely be ignored. Education has lost its way and needs drastic changes to develop thinkers and content creators. Instead, progressive educators believe in “teaching” children more about core beliefs and values and they ALL must align with their own.
Stephanie,
That’s a weird comment about Gates and this blog. Where did you get the impression that he is a deity here? I assume you started reading here in the last week or two.
If it’s not clear, it’s Gates and his “reforms” that I am writing about here:
Stopping by School on a Disruptive Afternoon | Bob Shepherd | Praxis (wordpress.com)
My suggestions for changes in English teacher preparation programs:
What Should Be Taught in an English Teacher Preparation Program? | Bob Shepherd | Praxis (wordpress.com)
I re-read your essay. The tale of the teacher who asked about Yeets recalled an experience I had when I first started teaching math.
There was a person in my school who had been hired to teach math a couple of years before me, but had landed in guidance. Students told me stories of melt-downs in class over various issues. This person had gone through a lot in her personal life right at the time she was taking on teaching.
One day I was hanging out in the teacher work room. A tiny room with a couch, a coke machine, a blue mimeograph machine, and a table. I sat at the table, working the kids homework before I assigned it. She came in and peered over my shoulder.
”Ooo, graphs,” she shuddered.
She was a really good person and a good friend. She should never have been teaching math. Actually I was equally incompetent and should never had a chance to teach math either. But it was the early 1980s, and you could no more find a math teacher than yo can find a person today in the Republican Party who will speak truth about Trump. I ended up teaching myself math. I ended up teaching math for 29 years and doing oK. Several of my kids became engineers. I started a calculus program at our little rural school and designed a curriculum progression that fit our students much better than the state program that was forced on us in 2009. But the kids could have had better. Better, that is, if salaries had kept up with the economy and competent people could have been hired.
Roy,
I never met you but I love your voice. You are a wonderful person.
Agreed. Roy is an awesome human. This is why we at the Ayahuasca School for Little Cosmic Wanderers welcome him to join our community.
–Spiritual Wife Marietta Morning Glory
See also this:
What New English Teachers Should Know | Bob Shepherd | Praxis (wordpress.com)
I have been retired for the past decade, and I am not bored, mostly because I have a curious mind that encourages me to read, write and think. I thank my public education and study of the liberal arts for nurturing those traits. I also work on a variety of projects that include taking care of my home and property, and I volunteer to work with adult ELLs, which is a labor of love. I continue to have a close relationship with my adult children and grandson. Boredom is not a problem if someone remains engaged intellectually, socially and emotionally.
I am thankful for my defined pension, Social Security and Medicare benefits that contribute to making my humane retirement . All of us should be aware that The House’s recent budget proposal endorsed by over is a threat to the working class. It is a reverse Robin Hood plan to legalize the theft of earned benefits and transfer those funds to the ultra-wealthy in the form of tax cuts. Their proposal endorsed by 170 members of The House would gut Social Security, Medicare and the ACA. I and most of us olders will not be around for most of the draconian cuts, but young people must understand the consequences of a vote that could enable the GOP win and turn our country into heartless dystopia.
Young people and people of color need to show up and vote for Biden as they have a lot more to lose than us olders. They should stop blaming Biden for Gaza and understand that some of the unpopular, frustrating decisions from The White House had international implications. Biden could not abandon our ally, Israel, despite the right wing leadership of Netanyhu. The US recently called for a cease fire in Gaza, and Biden is building a temporary port to deliver supplies to Gaza. I hope young people and people of color can understand the bigger picture in this election and not waste their vote on a third party candidate, or vote against their own future, and cede power to those that want to destroy the working class. With razor thin margins in both The House and Senate, the GOP could finagle a win through gerrymandering, fake news and other assorted schemes to lie, cheat and steal. This is a time for liberal voices to band together in unity.
Here’s The White House press release about the social safety net. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/03/21/fact-sheet-80-of-house-republicans-release-plan-targeting-medicare-social-security-and-the-affordable-care-act-raising-costs-and-cutting-taxes-for-the-wealthy/
Thanks for sharing this, RT!
Thank you, Diane, for sharing this! I have Dr. Greene’s book on a shelf next to the works by another great American defender of the Liberal Arts, Dr. Diane Ravitch! xoxoxoxxo!!!!
Amazon.com: Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm: 9781421444604: Greene, Gayle: Books
Amazon.com: Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm: 9781421444604: Greene, Gayle: Books
Education profs out there: this book would make great supplemental reading for your Methods classes!
Future teachers need something to inspire them. A teaching career is a marathon, not a sprint. Being able to teach with dignity would entice more young people to sign up and stay in the profession. As Peter Greene notes, teachers are demoralized. It is difficult to attract people to a demanding career where they are the nation’s whipping boy. https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2024/03/teacher-morale-is-everything-fine.html
Well said, RT!
Great point, RT. The marathon to which you refer has constantly changing rules. I was just yesterday explaining to my daughter how different I looked teaching when I was older than I looked when I was young. Teaching is being everything to everybody, and it takes endurance.
I can’t imagine that intelligent young people now are going to choose to be teachers and stay for a lifetime like our generation. Work has changed in terms of flexibility, etc. Teaching doesn’t provide that. I think the whole view of working 30-40 years of your life at one job is changing. For very intelligent people, teaching just doesn’t give the intellectual stimulation and opportunity for creativity that one might crave. There’s a lot of busy work that is meaningless. Teachers are often treated like children. Testing all the time. There are a lot of drawbacks now. I’m not sure how intelligent young people can be inspired to choose to be teachers nowadays.
The only positive advertisement for teaching right now is “Abbott Elementary.”
my daughter, herself a consumer of Abbot Elementary, agreed. She wants to teach little children to sing.
Teaching children to sing! Now there’s a noble ambition!
Let me add to this the low teacher salaries in many states also make teaching an unlikely career for young people. In New York State, the teacher certification process is ridiculous. I look back at some of the things I had to do to get certified. Some of those things were completely meaningless to becoming a French teacher. Yet now, as French is being phased out at my school and I might be losing my job or going to part time, I’ve thought of teaching ESL. But I’ll have to take a test and work towards certification. Why???? It seems to me that after teaching French for 30 years, I should be able to teach ESL automatically. I’ve been teaching a language that is not my first language. I know the methodology. English is my first language. Why should I have to jump through more hoops? 30 years of teaching experience!!! Yet now a gym teacher with no experience teaching languages can take a test and then teach ESL and work towards certification. There’s no logic to the whole thing. My point: the ridiculous certification requirements prohibit good teachers form doing more and possibly moving to needed subjects. Further, the complicated (and sometimes meaningless) requirements make it difficult for people wanting to become teachers.
I started as a French teacher, and I became an ESL teacher after finishing my master’s degree. My French helped a great deal since most of our students were Haitian at the time. I also know some Spanish which also helped as our student population changed over time.
The comments here about Bill Gates are quite uninformed. He is an avid reader, including in the liberal arts. I don’t agree with all of his ideas, but he is highly intelligent (1590 SAT and got into Harvard).
I’m also a lifelong avid reader who greatly values the liberal arts. But most people don’t, even most college graduates who don’t read even one single serious book on average every year. No one is stopping college students from taking liberal arts courses and from reading independently after they leave school. Professors could help the cause for liberal arts by not politicizing so many of their classes and turning most discussions into seminars about race, class, gender, DEI, victimology, etc. I have several young relatives (all quite liberal) who told me they were bored by so many of their professors turning humanities classes into struggle sessions and ideological harangues.
Roberta,
No one here questions Bill Gates’ intellect but many (including me) questions his arrogance and the ideas he imposes on public schools. He has used his billions to promote standardized testing, charter schools, judging teachers by the test scores of their students, the Common Core, and merit pay. All of his educational ideas have removed creativity, joy, spontaneity, and demoralized students and teachers alike.
He most certainly has not encouraged creative reading or writing. He has supported the standardization of teaching and learning. It’s all been a dismal failure.
He should have been promoting the kind of schooling he and his own children had: small classes, close interactions between students and teachers, reading of whole books, emphasis on the joy of learning, not test scores.
I question Bill Gates’ intellect. He dropped out of undergraduate school to pursue financial gains. He did not pursue knowledge. He pursued money. That’s not what an intellectual does. He has a team of sycophants paid to create his genius persona so that he can pursue more data with less resistance. It was funny and informative when he endorsed Anand Giridharadas’ book Winners Take All, a book that directly criticized Gates’ actions. It seemed he hadn’t actually read the book. Bill Gates isn’t enlightened; he’s just greedy. Shortsighted. Dumb.
Agreed. That he is a breathtakingly slow learner surrounded by yes men and yes women is clear from the fact that he hasn’t learned how devastating his Common [sic] Core [sic] project was for American schools. The guy is a nanometer deep.
leftcoastteacher32224It was even funnier (not) when Mr I want to eliminate disease (Gates)by seeking to vaccinate people against them. Pushed Oxford University to partner with AstraZeneca preserving Patent Rights, rather than open sourcing their research for the world to use in a Pandemic. Like many plutocrats before him; Gates has been a philanthropist only as it suited his own best interest. Opening the door to open sourcing medical knowledge in a Pandemic might lead to one day opening the door to his empire. An empire built on a Government sponsored monopoly system, designed in the 15th century.There is very little dispute on this blog that his endeavor into education has been self serving.
Gates has a publicity team producing stories in important places about what a brilliant and generous and innovative and selfless person he is.
Ms. Fleck, read Professor Greene’s book for a view from inside of what is happening to the liberal arts in U.S. colleges and universities.
The comments here about Bill Gates are quite uninformed. He is an avid reader, including in the liberal arts.
We are all quite familiar with the Gates propaganda machine and with his self-promotion via his book lists. The guy is a slow learner, and he hasn’t a clue how and why other people tick. He has done enormous damage, like a drunk who has run his car up onto a sidewalk and trashed a bunch of pedestrians and then driven away nonchalantly, unaware that anything has happened. His picture should be next to “clueless” in the dictionary.
I doubt Bill Gates reads anything. He put a blurb on Anand Giridhadaras’ book “Winners Take All,” a searing critique of America’s oligarchs. Gates was exactly the kind of elite the book criticized. Someone else wrote the blurb.
If he does read, it’s clear that almost none of it sinks in.
I whole-heartedly agree, Bob. As a retired English Language Arts teacher from the Rhode Island School for the Deaf, as a long-time advocate for authentic teaching and learning in America’s public schools, and as a long-time opponent of high-stakes standardized testing, I read Gayle Greene’s current book with enthusiastic appreciation. This book is a joy/grief to read–a joy because it validates the value of the liberal arts in enabling students to think through complex situations in the company of other seekers, to become their best selves, and to find their voice; and a grief because it exposes the shallow and selfish mind-set of the “reformers” determined to reduce those complex human situations to data. A teacher can never know how students will carry their teachings with them through life. This learning can never be measured. In addition, I love the way that Ms. Greene taught her students. I wish I had had her for a teacher! I am in complete agreement with her arguments for the absolute necessity of the liberal arts. The disheartening state of social discourse in this country seems to me to be proof that dismissing the value of the liberal arts is a calamity. The toxic “reforms” perpetrated on k-12 and higher ed in the name of “accountability” have been profoundly destructive, and in my view are crimes against humanity.
Well said. Machines cannot replace real human discourse and critical thinking. While data may inform instruction, it should not be a goal in and of itself.
So well said, Shiela!!!
Thank you, Bob. I look forward to reading Immeasurable Outcomes.
Let us know what you think when you’ve read it, LCT!!! I look forward to your response to it. One of my favorite books in a long, long time.
Stopping by School on a Disruptive Afternoon
Bob Shepherd
after decades of test-driven education “reform”
Whose schools these are, I think I know.
His house is near Seattle though.
He will not see me stopping here
to watch what kids now undergo.
My better angels think it queer
to see a place so void of cheer
what with the tests and data chats,
the data walls with children’s stats.
Where are the joys of yesterday—
when kids would draw and sing and play?
The only sound I hear’s defeat
and pencils on the bubble sheets.
Disrupters say, unflappable,
“We’re building Human Capital!”
Such word goes out from their think tanks,
as they their profits build and bank.
“Music, stories, art, and play
won’t teach Prole children to obey
with servile, certain, gritful grace
and know their rightful, lowly place.”
The fog is heavy, dark and deep.
Where thinking tanks, Deformers creep
and from our children childhood steal
and grind them underneath the wheel.
Postscript:
Disruption of the Commonweal
is that in which Deformers deal
that they might thereby crises fake
as cover whereby they might take
(the smiling villains!) take and take
and take and take and take and take.
Robert D. Shepherd. Copyright 2020. This post may be shared freely. (Please do!) But please include the attribution. Thanks!
Children can learn a second language easily and enjoyably through poems, games and songs.
Absolutely. And language games are a really important part of creating readers and writers.
Nice to encounter a breath of fresh and hopeful air, especially on a night when winter is making a comeback outside. It’s been a long week. Thanks, Bob.
Thanks, John, and much love to you and yours.
Bob Shepherd
Bob I am a big fan of Liberal Arts Education. I suspect it is one piece of that puzzle of making a Human Being. Education has to coincide with an individuals life experiences in order to be effective. Or in my case it did.
Depriving a generation of the reference points a Liberal Arts Education provides is the goal of eliminating Liberal Arts.
Broad liberal arts education doesn’t make for gritfully compliant Do-Bees.
You got it, Bob.
About the demands now placed on teachers, see my note below, Mamie. So sorry you are going through this bs. I don’t see why anyone would want to teach under current conditions.
Sorry, my longer comment is in moderation, Mamie. Poor Diane, having to deal with WP all the time!!!
I took my grandson to a movie today and was offline for a few hours.
It was a wonderful movie called “Cabrini.” I may review it. It was powerful.
I worked for decades as a writer and editor of textbooks and online learning materials in the English language arts. In my work for the biggest textbook publishing houses, eventually at very high levels, I directed large teams of textbook creators. In my career, I made major innovations that how English was taught nationwide. I planned the textbook program (as in wrote the tables of contents for it) that introduced critical thinking as a strand in U.S. education. I personally wrote a lot of that program. I planned and wrote much of the program that introduced the process of writing in the United States. I created the models for and directed the creation of Daily Oral Language Plus, which popularized the concept of Bellwork. I also created the models for and directed the creation of what I believe to be the first grammar and composition program to incorporate a model-papers-and-rubrics approach to assessment of writing, which became the standard assessment method for composition. I played key roles in developing some of the most widely used textbook programs in literature, grammar and composition, speech and drama, the research paper, and African-American studies. I wrote vast amounts of instructional material myself. There wasn’t a 6-12 school in the U.S., I suspect, that wasn’t using one or more of my textbooks. After that career, I decided to go back into the classroom (I had taught at the beginning of my career) to apply, myself, personally, all that I had learned to teaching kids.
That’s how I found myself in a high-school with idiot APs who would presume based on their two years of experience teaching 7th-grade social studies to micromanage me, to tell me how to teach English. It was like having Tom Cruise lecture Ed Whitten about math. Seriously, these people would presume to tell me, the person who introduced Bellwork to the American educational community, how and when to do Bellwork. So, that was ridiculous. But even more ridiculous were the hoops I had to jump through in order to be certified, even though I had decades earlier received lifetime certification to teach English 9-12 based on completion of a teacher certification program in college; had held teaching certificates in Indiana, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts; and had had that illustrious career as a curriculum developer.
I had to pay for and take SEVEN different idiotic, deform-based Pearson teaching tests.
I had to keep a massive notebook (approximately 600 pages) documenting hundreds of things I had done in my classes over a year’s time and submit this for approval to the district.
I had to take 300 hours (!!!!!!) of online ESL training that was so badly conceived that I used to follow each lesson by submitting as my required “Reflection” a list of the errors in fact, grammar, usage, mechanics, and sense.
All this was in addition to the breathtaking amount of busy work that I was required to complete as part of my teaching job: decorating my classroom and the outside hallways, serving as a bus line monitor, doing test prep, preparing data walls, preparing word walls, doing data chats, completing and submitting plans for personal development, posting two grades per student each week, preparing and maintaining a website for every class that included all handouts and assignments and lesson plan highlights, preparing three-page lesson plans for each of the 27 different classes I taught each week, and so on. In the years during which I had been away from the classroom doing textbook development, teaching had become utterly deprofessionalized and micromanaged by morons.
I don’t know why anyone would submit themselves to such bullshit. And did I mention that when I took that teaching job, I did so for 14.45% of what I had earned in my last job in the educational publishing industry? A little more than a tenth of the pay for far, far more work, often work that had been made demeaning by a system based on micromanagement.
“In the years during which I had been away from the classroom doing textbook development, teaching had become utterly deprofessionalized and micromanaged by morons.” Thanks Bill Gates and David Coleman–deformed an entire generation and caused untold anguish to teachers who were dedicated to their calling
exactly
I know, Bob…complete lunacy. On the flip side, I once had a school superintendent praise philosophy and suggest that I might teach French Literature (in HS!!)!!!!!!!! A really nice older gentleman. Probably the last of his kind. I fantasized about teaching Balzac, Hugo, Voltaire….but then came to my senses.
In a better world!!!!
Think of what all those kids lost because you were not enabled to do that, Mamie! It’s freaking tragic.
Over the years I’ve been able to sneak in some French lit. Tartuffe, The Count of Monte Cristo, Cyrano de Bergerac, Le Petit Prince, some poetry, fairy tales, even a few of Balzac’s short stories. So it’s been ok. 😊
xoxoxox
Thanks Bob. I’ll wait for Diane to take it out of moderation. Those tech gods are tricksters, you know!
Warm regards to you and yours, Mamie!
It’s no longer in moderation! I was at the movies with my 10 yo grandson.
xoxoxo