___Leading up to this year's conflict project, the students studied conflict through reading Suzanne Collins's book, The Hunger Games. No doubt you've heard of it by now.

Students from all three class periods who owned the book temporarily donated their copy to the classroom, so that each period had enough copies for all of the students to follow along and take turns reading aloud..._

____I have read a bunch of bad books lately. Or just mediocre ones. I'm not excited about any of the four I'm currently reading, either. I checked my recent reviews, and of the last 17 books I've read, I have only really been impressed by one. Steinbeck knows his stuff. But I already knew that.

The book 18 books ago that impressed me was Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins by Eric A...

__This winter has been absolutely beautiful. According to the Fox 12 Weather Blog from late January, the long-range weather forecast for Portland is decidedly un-Portland-like:
     • Little to no rainfall is likely from this Wednesday afternoon through at least the 10th of
        February, possibly longer.
     • Little or no snowfall in the Cascades for the next 10-14 days... essentially the first half of
        February could be snow-free in the mountains...

_Leading up to this year's con- flict project, the students were shown a variety of images, and asked to generate "non-Goo- gle-able" questions about the pictures. For example, for the picture of the space shuttle, a boring, Google-able question would be, "How much fuel does it take to get to the moon?" A much better, high- level question would be "What makes humans want to ex- plore space?" The students worked in small groups...

Early Monday morning, two strong earthquakes awakened the Bay Area. At 5:33 am, a magnitude 3.5 quake, followed immediately by a magnitude 4.0 quake shook approximate- ly 5.5 miles below the surface in El Cerrito, CA. Another mild aftershock was felt a half hour later. Though the quakes served as a rude awakening and were felt as far away as Santa Cruz, they were...

_Plugging his new book, Space Chronicles, Neil DeGrasse Ty- son appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and nearly made Jon want to be- come an astrophysicist himself (watch the clip, you'll want to become one, too!). Tyson is doing pretty well bringing the wonder back to science and making it friggin' awesome. Just like the great Carl Sagan. Known as a popularizer of..._

__You know when you learn a new word, and then suddenly, you see the word everywhere? That's kind of what happened to me this week with Frank Chimero, only it wasn't the first time I had heard of him. I have proof, see, on this very blog, from back in the early days. So early, in fact, that the post was originally done on a platform that no longer exists, and was transported to this..._

_I just started re-watching 21 Jump Street. You know how when you remember the 80s, it seems like the whole decade is a caricature of itself? Turns out, the 80s really were that ridiculous, and the early 90s weren't much better. "Graffiti art is all the rage now, sir." The thing that's been getting me most about the unfortun- ate fashion choices are the wildly mismatched earrings..._

_This photograph was taken by Desto of Ser Verdadero. Both the photograph and the mu- ral's message deserve to be shared as often as possible. Muralist Salvador Jimenez...
_

__...twice as big as it needs to be. I spent a bit of time this week sitting in on a few middle school classes with which I soon will be working. As I lis- tened to them discuss complex topics of monumental import- ance, impressed all the while by their eloquence and com- passion, I was reminded of a moment in that very classroom two years ago that blew me away (names have been...

__So there I was, minding my own business (as usual) when I came across an eHow in- structional article. The article itself was rather strange and specific: How to Draw Zodiac Constellations. And there I am, cited as an expert in the defin- ition of a Zodiac Constellation. This was, mind you, before I was a published author on...