Late at night, I open my laptop again and retrieve a Google Slides presentation. It looks eerily familiar, the same layout of a slide that used to gleam each morning at the front of my classrooms. On one side, a word of a orientation for those entering the room. Where am I? Language Arts 9!…
Tag: teaching
Preschool
I have a complicated relationship with preschool. Complicated because, as an educator, I know it’s important. I’ve read the articles, seen the case studies, have a passing knowledge of the demographics suggesting that early childhood education is a strong indicator for later academic success. I want everyone to go to preschool, and I want it to…
Open Letter To My Children on the Fourth of July, 2020
I’ll have to do this work someday, too, and I hope I handle it with the grace of my parents, for whom exposing me to brutal stories was an act of love. Brit Bennet, from “Addy Walker, American Girl” 4 July 2020 Dear Daughters, 364 days ago one of you—the only one who was speaking…
Bones
“Mom… when are we going to get a book about the body?” It’s a frequent refrain these days, a question that has blossomed into our lives like the pink flowers on the tree outside our bedroom window. What we need, Luci decided some weeks or maybe a month ago, is a book. A book that explains,…
Twenties Questions
With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. William Wordsworth, from “Tintern Abbey” It takes me…
Appreciation
I went to ninth grade afraid. Like many students who leave Christian schools, I entered the “real world” (in my case public high school) with a head full of warnings. I was somewhat apprehensive that in my first month of school I—a fourteen-year-old honors student, a decent violinist and a mediocre volleyball player—would be ridiculed…
An Eclipse and An Inauguration
My daughter wakes up at 9:00 PM. I hear her upstairs, stirring, waking up from what she must assume is a nap, in her pajamas, in the dark. Someday, I’ll put her to bed and she’ll just stay asleep. But not today. Oh well. Anyway, I’m hardly busy. I’m literally lying on the couch in a…
The First Day of No School
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there, To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance….
Last Day Letter: Our Better Country
Ever since the student-teaching days, I’ve ended school with a letter. It’s something I remember loving in high school—the one time a teacher did it—these final written words that summed up a year. Now, I write as much for myself as for them, this summing-up providing my own version of closure. I started posting them…
The Way Home 