WHAT THEY SAID…
0717 by Jeff HessThe Hollywood glow of the educator-as-hero, a figure familiar from stump speeches and pop entertainment, has faded. Don’t go to HBO’s The Wire, set last season in the Baltimore public school system, for a dose of idealism.
The much-praised independent film Half-Nelson is grim, too, with Ryan Gosling starring as a drug-addicted maverick trying-and failing-to teach history his own way in a New York City middle school. The Sundance Channel’s documentary The Education of Ms. Groves, which aired this week, unsparingly exposes a new teacher’s naive optimism, according to the New York Times.
Freedom Writers is the exception: To watch Hilary Swank single-handedly create an oasis of harmony in a gang-ridden L.A. high school seems a throwback to a simpler narrative arc. Ann Hulbert
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. 
I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is 
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: 
