P picked out two books tonight and asked me to choose one to read for her bedtime story.

The first option was Four Fish Fly in the High, Yellow Sun.

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My Uruguayan friend/sister, Marta, just emailed me to tell me about her country’s latest achievement – it’s become the first nation in the world to reach the goal of providing a laptop to every single elementary school student in the country.  This is incredible!  Although I’m thrilled for Uruguay, I find myself contrasting this achievement with the vivid stories presented in Jonathan Kozal’s  Savage Inequalities about what life is like in America’s poorest schools.  When I think about this, I feel sad and a little ashamed.

If Gandhi and others were right about being able to judge a society by how it treats its weakest members, Uruguayans should be feeling pretty darn proud right now.  Americans?  Not so much.

Soon before we left for China, Chris had the following exchange with P:

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It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted anything here.  One reason is that I’ve been back at work for the first time in almost a year, and the adjustment has left me exhausted.  Lately, it seems that if I stay up a minute past 8:30pm, I spend the better part of the following day in a lumbering, slow-brained stupor.  For a while, I was blaming my back-to-school exhaustion on my advancing age, but I happened upon an old diary the other day, and reading it, I realized I’ve always struggled with this time of year.

I seem to start out with a lot of enthusiasm and energy for each new school year.  Take, for example, my entry from August 26, 1981 (Note:  please read with a strong Southern twang):

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