“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.”…
Category: Learning
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…
“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…
Do It Yourself
“What are you supposed to be?” Everyone, Fall Party 2012 Emily and I walk back to school Friday night, partially costumed as our respective favorite things. That’s the theme of this year’s High School Fall Party: Our Favorite Things. All students and staff have been instructed to dress up as… essentially anything. Anything that we…
In the Dorm
It’s quiet when they leave. When supper was finished, the younger boys washed the dishes and mopped the floor, while the older ones packed and I baked banana cake. Then, an hour later, we piled down the stairs and out to the parking lot, where we waved goodbye, Sound of Music style, to the seniors….
A New Year: Reading and Recommending
You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all. II Corinthians 3:2 (English Standard Version) It’s like a high school version of Laura Numeroff’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. “If you teach all the eleventh graders English–and both they and you do a reasonably good job, and…
Of Graduation, Extravagant Gifts
Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen. Ephesians 3:20-21 (italics mine) “I think, I think, we can keep it under an hour. It’ll be tricky,…
A Junior Farewell
I’ve loved this year. I spent today, the last day of classes at BFA, as I’ve spent many days with this year’s group of students, sitting on the grass by the river, talking about books. Thankful tonight for the blessing of working with these students I so deeply admire and will miss dearly. In lieu of…
The Runaway Bunny
“I will become a little sailboat, and I will sail away from you.” “If you become a sailboat and sail away from me,” said his mother, “I will become the wind…” The Runaway Bunny, Margaret Wise Brown “Am I late?” she breathes as she whirls into the room, a hurricane of red hair with bags–school,…
The Way Home 