Now I find it difficult to fall asleep at night. My mind wanders through the news and experiences of the day, and I imagine disastrous outcomes. Or I think of things I could say. Should say. Or actions I could take that might somehow change what's happening in the world. Then the defeated feeling sets in.

For the last three or four years of teaching, I've been trying to incorporate technology into my teaching practice, particularly around assessing student work, as a way to capitalize on all of the advances that technology seems to provide, particularly around speed and convenience.

Last night I was watching the news before going to bed, and I saw an excerpt of a new ISIS propaganda video that apparently has several versions produced in different languages, including English. There was a section of the video that flashed through the last three or four American presidents, calling them awful names, then landed on a graphic that featured the letters "LGBT" and the word "sodomites" with a voiceover saying something about America being a land of sodomites. In the moment I dismissed it as gibberish, but the images and language kept coming back to me as I tried to fall asleep.