Some New Sites

Although it probably leads to me to spend more time online than is good for me, I love checking out people’s blogs and the links on their blogs…I could easily spend hours just going from site to site.  It’s amazing to me how much stuff is on the internet, and how much it has changed since I first learned what the internet was in 7th grade.  The way the internet is completely changing the way information is produced, distributed and consumed is unparalleled.  I go back and forth on the pros and cons of a society so dependent on this technology…but I admit that I feel like I’m a more informed person for having access to the internet.

Plus, I’m a link junkie.  A good friend of mine is starting up her blog and I’ve been happily perusing her links.  Here are some of my favorites:

• Sweet Beet and Green Bean: A fun food blog with luscious photos and mouth-watering recipes…I also love that Jacqueline has decided to share her recipes under the creative commons license.

• Class Matters: An interesting site built around a book of the same title, by Betsy Leondar-Wright.  As the first in my family to attend college (and a private, women’s  east coast college at that!), I spent four years intensely exploring the ways in which class influenced my cultural paradigms…There’s some interesting stuff here.  I think it would be an interesting conversation to get public and private Montessorians together to have a real, engaging conversation on how class impacts the work we do in the classroom, without the usual glossing over of “universal human tendencies”. The realities are far more complicated than that.

• Somatosphere: The collaborators of this blog bill it as “A collaborative weblog covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry and bioethics.”

If I were to go back to school, I would study medical anthropology.  I think it’s a fascinating cross-section of science, health, culture, and social justice.  One of my favorite non-fiction books is The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman.  She tells the story of a young Hmong girl suffering from seizures…interpreted by her family as a sign that her soul has left her body, and by the doctors as a severe case of epilepsy.  The ensuing efforts by her doctors and family to meld Hmong healing with Western medicine highlight the competely different ways in which health and disease are constructed around the world.

Coming later this week: More reflections from my student teaching and the NAMTA conference I attended a month ago in Seattle, and a commentary on John Snyder’s article on specialists in the Montessori classroom. Stay tuned!