Zig zag

Zig Ziglar passed away nearly two weeks ago at the age of 86. I’ve been meaning to get up a post about Ziglar because I first encountered his personal brand of positive thinking at a time of my life when I wasn’t positive about much. In fact, being positive used to be something I never put much stock in. I had no truck with optimism, instead finding it easier traveling the paths of cynicism and negativity. When appraising any situation, I always saw a glass that was half empty.

Ziglar was part of a pantheon of 20th century positive-thinking gurus that included Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, Napoleon Hill, Og Mandino, and W. Clement Stone, to name just a few. All of these men believed that people had the ability to change their circumstances as a result of the power of the mind and their attitudes. Continue reading

Broken beyond repair

Education as a system is broken in America. Whatever method you use to evaluate schools will yield a result that’s disappointing. While there are still good schools and communities where the K-12 model works, most don’t.

In Chicago, a city with nearly 400,000 public school students, a labor impasse finds schoolchildren staying at home for a third day, as teachers picket, demanding changes in how they are evaluated, more autonomy to teach, and an increase in their salaries and benefits. Meanwhile, the students are the losers. Continue reading