Barry Pomeroy's Blog

I once told a colleague that I didn’t believe in objective marking, and she enthusiastically agreed. “I don’t think it’s possible to be objective,” she said.

I told her that I didn’t think we should try to be objective, or even that objectivity is an admirable goal. “The world hasn’t been objective with our students, so we shouldn’t try to pretend there is a level playing field when we are judging their performance.”

She was puzzled by the assertion, so I told her that I don’t think we can judge...

Today I posted a picture on Instagram showing off my poorly realized darning work. I was repairing a pair of knitted booties which I use as slippers. One of my former students asked me why I didn’t buy a new one. I answered that they were made by my ex’s grandmother, and weren’t really replaceable in that way. I told her I was also trying to remember the skill of darning, since it had been years since I’d tried to repair anything that way. She said she understood that I was developing the skill,...

Many people do not realize that their house or apartment is merely a conduit for the landfill. They imagine that each thing they bring into their house to be valuable on its own, as if they intend to keep it forever. The possible exception would be household goods like cleaners and groceries. Those they know are fated to exit the back door and enter the waste stream. In fact, however, everything in their house has the same destiny. When they are moving in, as they struggle to lift ponderous furn...

Although some might claim that we no longer need journalists, that the internet has given us access to primary sources which we can interpret for ourselves—“do your own research” anyone—I think we need them now more than ever. Those who declaim journalism as a field are sometimes merely disagreeing with the message, or are responding both to censorship of journalists who refuse to toe the party or state line, or have an older notion of a journalist as a reporter who goes out into the world and c...

I rather thoughtlessly quoted the bible when I was talking to my friend about being gay. She has partially emerged from her closet—which is a fraught enterprise for her because of her religious background—and we were discussing the tendency of bible people to judge. Once she came out as gay they began to make their judgmental pronouncements. To suggest an oft-used biblical way to combat that mentality, I repeated once again the edict against judgments: Matthew 7:1 “Judge not or ye be not judged....

Fifty percent of the Choctaw people had only just survived the forced relocation from Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana into Oklahoma (the aptly named Trail of Tears), when a member of the tribe heard about An Gorta Mór, the great famine in Ireland. Despite barely being able to provide for themselves in the barren land of Oklahoma, the Choctaw of Skullyville and the Choctaw of Doaksville donated three hundred and twenty dollars, or the equivalent of five thousand dollars today.

Perhaps because...

When Biss and I decided to take his son on a canoe trip, I suggested a lake I’d gone to before. We would be canoeing in the dark, which we often did, and that lake afforded opportunities that other locations didn’t. For instance, Aaron had a terrible sense of direction, paid more attention to impressions than specific details, and would therefore have no idea that we were retracing the same path or going in circles. And that was exactly what I planned to do.

I wanted Aaron to have a grand advent...

I never pondered who was driving for Uber until I saw a Tesla with an Uber sign on it waiting outside the university. I realized that I needed to re-examine my presuppositions. I had presumed that most people who drove for Uber needed the money and most Tesla drivers were rich.

I guessed that Uber drivers were desperate enough to join Uber’s rigged game because they either didn’t have formal training or their certificates were not accepted in Canada. Some might also have another fulltime job and...

Harrol was a city guy. He’d gone to university and played his part in the corporate drama. He had a house and a bland family, and his mother who’d come to stay with him. According to her, he did nothing correctly, and even his wife would join in heaping ridicule on his work, his hair, his muscles. According to them, he was only good when he was signing household cheques.

Harrol’s business was prisons. He was responsible for building new wings in the main prison, and for developing guard schedule...

Comments about haters, or people who have no contributions other than to heap ridicule onto another’s accomplishments, are common now, but the phenomenon is not new. I would venture a guess that even when the first stone tool was smashed out of rock there was someone standing to one side, someone whose greatest accomplishment was rudimentary control over their bowels, who had something negative to say or unsolicited advice to offer.

Oddly, the greater the accomplishment seems to draw the most am...