I’ve noticed a slew of advertisements recently, both on-line and on late night television (and herein lies a clue, future detectives, to my sleeping habits) for various training opportunities in law enforcement, national security, and various jobs for dealing with criminals and incarceration. Here is an email I just received a few moments ago:

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I recently sat in on a meeting of a group of pre-K through second grade teachers planning their school's Halloween celebration.They were charged with coming up with Halloween games for the event. One of the teachers provided the succint suggestion: " Take a traditional game, like bowling or bean bag toss, and put a ghost on it." This seemed to me to be a wise, efficient, and sufficiently scary recommendation for a holiday that calls for just the right balance between terror and delight.

Every year, at Easter time, I buy a new box of yellow "Peeps" (marshmallow candy chicks) as a kind of ready-made art installation that I keep on my living room coffee table. They look comfortable and attractive and synthetic in their neat little rows, sealed beneath the cellophane. I keep them in the box.

More and more, we are hearing calls for a more creative workforce activated by, as the business writer Daniel H. Pink calls it, "a whole new mind". The idea seems to be that in an information economy, developing creative and critical thinking skills is becoming increasingly necessary for our citizenry in order to effectively adapt to an ever-changing workplace and a radically fluctuating economy. If this is indeed true (and I believe that it is), our education systems must actively support learners in becoming increasing flexible, collaborative, and innovative.

 A few weeks ago, in a combative mood, I gleefully posted an attack on “tacky craft activities” as the enemy of aesthetic education. Today, in a more contemplative mood, I am wondering what is it specifically about these activities that make them so perennial?

As a total Wikipedia addict, I often encounter the term “disambiguation”, which frequently appears at the top of Wikipedia pages.  Here’s the definition : "The process of resolving conflicts in article titles that occur when a single term can be associated with more than one topic, making that term likely to be the natural title for more than one article.

Despite valiant efforts by arts education advocates over the last several decades, and real gains in arts education policy and practice, the current reality is that the visual arts education that most American children receive in schools consists primarily of tacky craft activities presented to them by classroom teachers. I actually have a great fondness for many of these activities, but that has more to do with lingering nostalgia for childhood than it does with aesthetic education.

While on a trip to Washington, D.C., I paid a visit to the offices of the U.S. Department of Education. Special structures had been built around the entrances to the building- replicas of the archetypal “Little Red Schoolhouse”. I later found out that these had been installed to protect government employees from falling masonry, but why were these particular wooden pieces of nostalgia chosen to grace the doorways to these large, gothic, stone buildings?

John Boller is a mathematics professor at the University of Chicago who works with Chicago public school teachers to support greater depth and authenticity in their mathematics teaching. He is working with the Chicago Public Schools Office of Academic Enhancement and with the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) at Swift and Thorp schools through a U.S. Department of Education grant to integrate the arts with rigorous mathematics instruction.

I grieve every day over the passing of Molly Ivins, the smart, funny, sharp tongued, big-hearted political commentator. She did not suffer fools, but she sure did enjoy exposing them. I miss her clear voice in these murky political times. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, and was in and out of treatment until her death in January of 2007. But she didn’t let her illness silence her. She was outspoken to the end. Here’s what she had to say in her last column: "We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders.