Author Archives: Chris Osmond

All over the country right now, teachers are being asked to work double and triple-hard. In response to widespread shuttering of schools — for weeks, maybe longer — thousands of districts are asking their staffs to create, sometimes out of nothing, credible and productive work that can be done by students from their homes orContinue reading “the shock and the sacred and the shock”

I am probably taking my undergrads online starting Monday, as they return from spring break. This isn’t university policy yet, but it’s not NOT policy either. Most recent guidance states that “faculty may choose to take classes online as they determine best meets the needs of their classes,” and I so determine. It is timeContinue reading “the presence of social distancing”

I love summer vacation. One of the most precious parts of a life in schools is the implacability of the schedule. In September, as sure as gravity, I teach. And right now, in the middle of the summer — unless I make a deliberate choice to do otherwise — I do not. But I getContinue reading “the fullness of emptying out”

It has become quite fashionable for educators and educational institutions to describe their offerings as contracts with their students. This is completely inaccurate, and misleading. I think I know why it is happening, though. I believe there is evidence that the value of education generally, and higher education specifically, is being gradually rendered suspect byContinue reading “This Syllabus is Not a Contract”

  (Kinda spoilery, sorry – go see it!) Believe it or not, the most memorable moment for me in horror movie of the year Hereditary is a relatively quiet one: a mom speaking to her son. Annie looks hard at Peter, both in profile. And suddenly something true, but horrible, erupts from her lips: sheContinue reading “The Grim Pedagogies of “Hereditary””

(UPDATE November 2019: This post served as the core of a paper I published in the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing on Halloween. It’s a great theme issue on “Curriculum of the Monstrous” — free access, check it out!) I love horror films more than anything, and vampire and zombie horror most of all. Horror isContinue reading “time to die”

Power wants your body softening in a chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them. – Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny Joanna and I went to a contra dance in rural eastern Tennessee last night, on a whim. Well,Continue reading “dance together, dance against”

The only work that matters, goes away. And only that which goes away, will stay. This is the nut of my weekend, when I returned after more than thirty years to my elementary and junior high schools in upstate New York. My son’s college visits took me there for the first time since we movedContinue reading “down to the bones”

5:00 AM on the first day of school and I can’t sleep. Some things never change. Even after a life in school, the night before the new year starts is different. It’s all possibility, all the way down. Everyone has an A, even me. All of the stories wait to be told again…or left inContinue reading “blessed unrest”

For Natalia Kormeluk, master teacher, on the occasion of her retirement – and the rest of the extraordinary faculty of The Field School. Probably two dozen on the way into campus from our house in the country, every day. Some still red but most bleached and desiccated, landlocked driftwood ships whose joints are giving way. LeftContinue reading “barns”