As often happens, I have words stuck in my head. These ones aren’t the common song lyrics, though. I’m the only person I know who is haunted by lines of prose. “We didn’t always live on Mango Street.” Those used to be first words I read to my students, back at Ingraham, nine thousand miles…
Author: Kristi
Teacher. Writer. Traveler. Learning to see God everywhere.
On Surprises
We’re sitting in a rectangle of desks on Friday afternoon, ready for Round Two of poetry presentations in American Literature class. Yesterday, the class was a showcase of teenaged creativity. I’ve arranged their projects on the low bookshelf that runs along the back of the room: a model village to illustrate E.E. Cummings’s “anyone lived…
Home is Wherever I’m With You
Brother Tom nodded understandingly. “It’s the memories, the old loyalties; they are so precious,” he said. “Things that meant so much, that stay present in the wood and stone of a place. If you let go of the place and the things that belong to it, you feel afraid that you’ll lose hold of the…
Marble Cake and Maugenhard
“Well, you should probably just make a dessert. Any kind of dessert, for Sunday night,” the Maugenhard RA tells me after a supper of spaghetti, during which we watched snow fall outside on the not-yet-green hills of the Black Forest. Spring is delayed this year, after what’s been called “the darkest winter in 43 years.”…
A Ring and a Question, A Kiss and a Prayer
Meet me where you’re going, Cause I want to be going where you are. Teach me what you’re knowing, Cause I want to be knowing who you are. “Meet Me Where You’re Going,” Cloud Cult For the seventh time, I return to the candle. It is alone between a road and a wide, snowy field,…
Winter Warmth
And in the humid ever-summer I dare his picturing mind not to go back to the shout of color, to the clean rasp of frosty air, to the smell of pine wood burning and the caressing warmth of kitchens. For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold…
English Teacher Neverland
“I mean, if you have to spend almost all of your money on something–” I begin. “–it should probably be a book,” he cuts me off with a solemn nod. “Exactly.” Honors American Literature, Winter 2013 I remember the war between kids and reading. It was a Genesis 3-style feud: And I shall put enmity between teenagers and…
This Is The Day
This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice, and be glad in it. Psalm 118:24 “I’m not that sporty,” I said one day long ago, walking around Greenlake with a friend. “You didn’t do sports in high school?” “No, I did. I ran cross country for three years. I didn’t really…
“Worth The Sadness”
I know that it’s English teacher heresy, but I find Dead Poets Society impossibly sad. Peter Weir’s 1989 film has become a personal classic, falling into the genre of “teacher movies” that I consume with the same emotional voracity that some men I know attach to sports or war movies. I love these movies, and watch them…
Of Returning
My students have obligingly pulled their chairs into a rough circle on the second afternoon of school in 2013. We’re reading Emily Dickinson aloud, each student sharing his or her favorite from last night’s reading, explaining why it was so special. My classroom fills with the call and response of familiar words in familiar voices, punctuated by…
The Way Home 