Hearing The Bells

I heard the bells on Christmas Day Their old, familiar carols play,      And wild and sweet      The words repeat Of peace on earth, good-will to men!  And thought how, as the day had come, The belfries of all Christendom      Had rolled along      The unbroken song Of peace on earth, good-will to men!  Till, ringing, singing on its way, The world revolved from night to day,      A voice, a chime,      A chant sublime Of peace on earth, good-will to men!  “Hey, this is a song!” I hear it half a dozen times as the eleventh-graders walk into class and pick up today’s reading, Longfellow’s “Christmas Bells.” “‘I heard the bells on Christmas Day,’” the first student reads aloud, then exclaims…

What Mary Knew

It’s Happy Hour. Not the Happy Hour of years past, but Luci and I have developed our own five o’ clock rhythm lately, while Timmy is at basketball practice. Luci sits in her high chair in the kitchen, while I make dinner and serve her bits of small food, a few pieces at a time,…

Weary

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough. Ralph Waldo Emerson Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary. Galations 6:9 My students silently and gingerly tiptoe across…

The Author Wept

This week, Black Forest Academy mourns the loss of  a baby girl born prematurely just a month ago to one of our new staff couples. We grieve as a community, lifting her parents and younger brother up in prayer, full of sadness and gratitude that she is at last whole. While we waited for her ride to…

The Fear Jacket

  I’m troubled from the start, Friday morning. Living nine hours ahead of my friends on the West Coast, the ongoing ugliness of election season in America unfolds mostly in the morning for me. I wake up and see it spattered across social media, the messy barbs of rhetoric flying between two people I don’t…

The Patience of Questions

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet An orange entrepreneur is telling a story to a red-suited politician. “…Somebody would call up Sean Hannity,…

Teaching & Remembering

Friday, September 9. I scrolled through my cache of YouTube speeches, looking for one to share with my students. Each Friday in Public Speaking class, we watch a speech together, then spend time afterwards critiquing and learning from the style and–to some extent–discussing the message. This was only the second Friday, though, so I had little…

More Than Passports

What is an American? What did you learn about America from the book you read this summer? By your own definition, how American are you? Write for five minutes without stopping. Be prepared to share! Honors American Literature, 5 September 2016 Familiar scratch of pen and paper, familiar slant of morning light through familiar second-floor…

Then & Now

Then It’s me, three bags and a violin, and climb the three floors to my new apartment downtown at the end of a hot summer day. I’ve taken three trains today, from Austria to my new home in Southwestern Germany. This morning, my new boss told me that I wouldn’t be teaching the classes I’d planned…

Walking

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 These days are about walking. Teacher preparation starts in two days, and school staff are filling our town…