Taco Salad Surprise Lunch: 1 Rousing renditions of “Happy Birthday”: 5 Birthday Cakes: 3 Icabod Crane Piñata: 1 Times Watching Disney’s 1949 “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (narrated by Bing Crosby!) With Eleventh Graders: 2 Long Walk Through Golden Forest: 1 Notes of love and greeting from friends, family and students: Countless Thanks to all, near…
Author: Kristi
Teacher. Writer. Traveler. Learning to see God everywhere.
There And Back Again
Nobody tells you when you get born here How much you’ll come to love it, And how you’ll never belong here. So I call you my country, And I’ll be lonely for my home And I wish that I could take you there with me. “Land of My Sojourn,” Rich Mullins It’s still dark at…
Gifts, Poems, Accidents
Furthermore, as for every man to whom God has given riches and wealth, He has also empowered him to eat from them and to receive his reward and rejoice in his labor; this is the gift of God. For he will not often consider the years of his life, because God keeps him occupied with the gladness of his heart. Ecclesiastes 5:19-20 I’ve never…
Knowledge of Good and Evil
The epilogue of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible hangs in silence in the last minutes of class, images of haunted farms and wrongly-executed non-witches dispersing like smoke into the sunny Friday afternoon. I congratulate my students on finishing the first book of the year, and ask them what they think. The reply is nearly unanimous: We don’t like…
Outward Spirals
It’s never too late to change the pace. Oh, how the days creep up on you, But the goodness is something you don’t have to chase ‘Cause it’s following you. And all you’ll hear is the music. And beauty stands before you. And love comes back around again, It’s a carousel, my friend. Vanessa Carlton,…
Miss Gruwell and Miss Potter
Like all good teachers, I went to see the 2007 film Freedom Writers as soon as it came out. As some people are with sports or science fiction movies, I am with teacher movies. I love them. Long before I was a teacher–even when I was struggling with teaching as a calling–I would watch Dead Poets’ Society or,…
God of All Seasons
Do not let kindness and truth leave you; Bind them around your neck, Write them on the tablet of your heart. Proverbs 3:3 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate…
Marker to Marker
You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home…. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days. The Brothers Karamazov Here…
About Tomorrow
And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But…
Holds
The steps of a man are established by the LORD, And He delights in his way. When he falls, he will not be hurled headlong, Because the LORD is the One who holds his hand. Psalm 37:23-24 (NASB) I’ve been climbing a lot this week. More, really, in one week at Tauernhof than the rest of the year in…
The Way Home 