Charles Jon "Chip" Mosher[1] (June 23, 1947 – November 15, 2021) was an educator, poet, author and newspaper columnist who wrote social commentary about education and history, as well as satirical fiction.
Beginning in 2005, he wrote a weekly column titled "Socrates in Sodom"[7] for Las Vegas CityLife,[8] an alternative newsweekly, until the paper folded in 2014.[9] The tag line at the end of his column stated that he was "a simple classroom teacher."[10] He also wrote a monthly almanac for CityLife.[11] In 2018, he began writing an almanac for Desert Companion magazine. The column, titled "Random Access Memory,"[12] also appears on Nevada Public Radio's website, which publishes the monthly magazine.[13]
As a teacher who wrote about the school district he worked for, the opinions in his column caused controversy.[14][15][16] As a result, he was regularly interviewed about education issues.[17][18] In the early 2000s, Mosher predicted cheating would occur on a national scale with the corporate reform of education. "It’s no longer about the students or teachers. It’s all about money,” the Las Vegas Weekly quoted him as saying after a Washington, D.C. cheating scandal and another one in Nevada in 2014.[6]
Bibliography
Mosher's chapter “Memoir of a Modern Woman in the Modern World” was included in the book The Anarchy of Memories: Short Fiction Featuring Las Vegas Icons, which was released by Huntington Press in October 2015. The book was part of a Las Vegas Writes project, a compilation of short fiction featured at the annual Vegas Valley Book Festival (since renamed the Las Vegas Book Festival).[19][20]
Mosher's contribution to the 2010 fictional book Dead Neon: Tales of Near-future Las Vegas, published by the University of Nevada Press,[8] was described by Publishers Weekly as "a parody of Harlan Ellison in C.J. Mosher's "A Girl and Her Cat... ."[21]
In 2005, he released a CD titled America, Please!, which includes 26 poems and one sci-fi short story.[22]
Awards
2011 Nobel Educator of Distinction Award for "excellence in teaching" from the National Society of High School Scholars.[23]