Relatively quiet weekend, as I managed to get a summer cold due to working with middle-aged women who have kids that started school. Go figure. The weekend was great though, First Friday and Pride Parade, and Saturday being Vegas StrEATs. One of the best things about living Downtown is that all of these things were happening within walking distance.
Had a really productive day today, but it ended on a bit of a sour note. I had the opportunity to go see a pre-screening of the new movie Won’t Back Down. The Chicago Teacher’s Union strike provided an interesting backdrop to the movie, which was a portrayal of single mother rallying to get her dyslexic daughter’s school reformed by using a “trigger law”. The movie had almost every stereotype that you could imagine, including a heroic do-good teacher product of TFA who sang to his kids about the promise of college, the prototypical bad teacher who couldn’t care about whether or not any of her kids learned, the evil bureaucracy that resisted all changes, and the sinister teacher’s union that valued teacher benefits over all else. Oh, and the 600 page union contract that wouldn’t allow its members to stay after school to tutor students… Frank Bruni discussed the movie in a recent post that is definitely worth reading. I have a lot more to say about it, but I would recommend that you pass on the movie. Not particularly entertaining, and horribly biased. Which, to be fair, I am too. But I’ll at least say so about my biases instead of making a movie about them while doing so in the name of entertainment. Full disclaimer, I am not a TFA basher or gung-ho union supporter either (though I do tend to support union positions on a number of things).
Something I have been struggling with lately is having enough information about grey areas to form a good opinion of them. I read more than the average person by my own guesstimation, but in no way feel like I have nearly enough time to be as well informed on any issue as I should. And I am in a fairly privileged position where I have both the time and the resources to do research. How can we make that kind of privilege more accessible?
Ovik Banerjee 
and how can we address information distribution to people who don’t have access to the internets and nytimes.com and only listen to the radio or watch the evening news? these people deserve just as intelligent conversations and opinion pieces that our best news sources write….
how can i blame people for ignorance if the media doesn’t seem to remedy much….(i.e. the radio)
Responsible journalism and public radio. Unfortunately, and this is a broad generalization, in my experience a lot of those people choose to listen to biased radio. No idea if they know it is biased or not.