Jack Campbell Jr.

Category: Social Commentary

  • On Stephen Hawking and the Rise of the Geek

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    This morning, I woke to the news that Stephen Hawking had died. These days, celebrity deaths are nothing new. We are in a post-cult of personality age, when a surge of media options and advanced marketing abilities created a mass of celebrity. As time has gone by, those people have aged, and it is only…

  • Magic, Pokemon, and other Family Gatherings

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    It may come as some shock, given how big of geek I am, that I hadn’t played Magic the Gathering until just recently. Sara thought that it would be a good thing to do together, rather than our normal pastime of sitting next to each other and reading. So, I sat down with her one…

  • Boogie Traps and Wooshie Cushions

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    “He fell in the boogie trap!” My recently-turned seven year-old has a fascination for buildings and structures. He plays with Legos almost constantly. His castle building stage led to a series of elaborate booby traps that has yet to run its course after two years. Children are adorable, and due to a combination of adorableness…

  • Test-Takers Don’t Change the World

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    NOTE: I am not a resident of Florida. But while these results do not affect me, nor my child, personally, I believe they are symptomatic of  an issue that does. Recently, the State of Florida noted a significant drop in student test results for their writing basic skills test. The drop was contributed to a…

  • A Mother’s Magic

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    “The sweetest sounds to mortals given Are heard in Mother, Home, and Heaven.” –          William Goldsmith Brown When you were a baby, resting snug inside your mother’s womb, you felt what she felt. She rubbed her stomach to show her love, and you felt it. You felt her excitement, her happiness, and sometimes her sadness.…

  • Papa Pressure

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    “There are three stages of a man’s life:  He believes in Santa Claus, he doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, he is Santa Claus.” – Author Unknown When I was a child, I believed there was nothing that my father could not fix.  G.I. Joes, Hot Wheels, and all other items of importance were delivered into…

  • The Christmas Corps: A journal from the front lines.

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    “A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” – Napoleon Bonaparte  Welcome to the Christmas Corps.  Some of you volunteered for this mission, some were drafted by fate or dumb luck.  But here we are, joined by our solitary missions to bring Christmas to our loved ones.  There was stress,…

  • Never let education get in the way of your kid’s learning.

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    The only thing interfering with my learning is my education. – Albert Einstein. There is a fundamental different between teaching and learning that we seem to be missing in our society.  We have become statistic-driven.  Our children, both yours and mine, are statistics in the war of education.  Unfortunately, true learning has never been about…

  • Our Lost Humanity

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    NOTE: I normally blog about writing and how it relates to life. However, I was so disgusted by what happened at Penn State this week that I could not help but blog my feelings. After all, in many ways that is what writing is about. In writing, we take life and distill it through words,…

  • Fahrenheit 2011

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    The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame – Oscar Wilde September is Banned Book Month. I have to confess that I never realized just how important it was while I was in high school.  I was lucky enough to attend a school where The Scarlet…