The Blaisdell Blog

I am a lifer in education.   I started teaching in 1968 and kept at it until my retirement. During that time, I saw some poor ideas come along, die from lack of pedagogical vigor and then be resurrected a generation later by another group of misguided zealots.   One of these was New Math.  To understand New Math you must understand how devastating the U.S.S.R.’s launch of Sputnik was to the free world.   I remember standing out in the cold, clear Colorado air with my family and our neighbors watching for the pinpoint of light moving across the night sky.   There it was.   Sputnik.   A Russian space satellite, the first in the world, and it wasn’t ours.   It was the enemy’s satellite, doing God knows what, circling the entire world impervious to American intervention.   The race for space was suddenly real, and we were running a distant second.   My parents were the generation that fought in both WWII and the Korean War.   They...

  President Donald Trump has sparked global indignation by suggesting NATO troops avoid frontline combat, minimizing the sacrifice made by America’s allies.   These are lies, they are the work of Trump and Putin acting together and they are hypocritical from Old Bone Spurs, who used daddy’s money to avoid military service five times.        Here is just one example of Trump’s lie.      While visiting some friends on Vancouver Island, Canada, my husband and I were taken to a memorial on Radar Hill in the interior mountains of the island.    The memorial was a commemoration of the 2 nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (2 PPCLI) and their moment of exceptional valor which occurred during the Battle of Kapyong, April 22-25, 1951.        The Korean War is frequently referred to as the, “forgotten” war.    It certainly isn’t by those who fought there, much less th...