film studies – David Cooper Moore

1 Apr 2013

Post at In Media ResThis week I'm participating in a weeklong conversation on nonfiction and reality television over at In Media Res. Enjoyed the opportunity to link to Chris Cagle's work on…

Recent Blog Posts

Seeing and unseeing 15 Oct 2018

Sometimes I’ll come across an idea or a metaphor in fiction writing that single-handedly restores my faith in literature to do what non-fiction can’t, to illuminate by stepping just outside of what is understood, re-frame radically within a fictional universe that shakes things so hard that my world shifts, too. That was the impact I had reading China Mievil […]

What is wrong with math? 26 Mar 2018

My school started using a blended curriculum model (which I won’t name here) recently, and I have a lot of thoughts about it, some pro- and some anti-, none of which would be totally appropriate for me to share here yet. The one thing that it has undoubtedly done, though, is dramatically improve our math curriculum. In the pre-blended days, our long-sufferin […]

Return to Oz 24 Mar 2018

My wife and son watched The Wizard of Oz together last weekend. He turns four in a few weeks. This was his second movie, but the first that he watched simply for pleasure, not because he was sick and needed a quiet activity for a few hours (that’s how he saw Moana). Since we don’t expose our sons to much screen media, my wife noticed that he reacted to the f […]

What if they knew what they needed, too? 25 Nov 2017

I just finished A School of Our Own, a strange, frustrating, and provocative book about a “school within a school” founded by a precocious 16-year-old, the son of an education and development theorist.It’s strange because the co-author (the mother) cedes well over half of the book to the articulate but nonetheless unpolished journals and reflections of her s […]

Horizons: Prison 24 Aug 2017

I’ve been thinking a bit about an off-hand comment I made in my last post, about prison abolition. My statement, which was too unequivocal in hindsight, suggested that I have problems with the idea of “prison abolition” as a policy or social goal. And it’s true that I have deeply ambivalent feelings about the basic idea of prisons – the existence of an insti […]