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Front Porch Nonfiction
- Dispatches from the Third Line by Alison Barker
“A park is not a farm.” This is the only piece of advice my father dispensed before my graduation from college that May. I hung on his every word, the more obtuse the better, like sticky notes written in a stranger’s short hand.
His aphorisms reflected intense observation, yet often lacked contextual shape, like warm marrow dislodged from its bone.
“A city is often a large small town.”
Perhaps his oblique language fostered my love of mystery, and multiple, shifting interpretations of simple signs.
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- Einstein the Retard by Katherine Field
Albert Einstein was slow. Or so we tell ourselves. We⎯the teachers, the mothers, the sisters of retards⎯feed ourselves this mythology so as to rewrite the narratives of those we want to teach and protect. And so, in order to remediate these young minds that are often flushed into the stagnant spiral of Special Education, we participate in and rely on these tales, even when⎯especially when⎯they are debunked by the most thorough of biographers and researchers. Fictions, half-truths, barefaced lies: our remedy and means of combat against those who choose simply to see our child, our brother, our students as nothing more than helpless retards.
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