Category: teaching
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Anticipating the First Day of School? Your Teacher Is, Too
And she wants an ideal year — just like you This week’s blog post will take you out of my personal blog site to Medium.com, where I usually cross-post what I write here first. I had to do it in reverse this week because I wrote this week’s blog for the Medium Writers Challenge. The […]
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Back When I First Taught Book Publishing, I Tried It Myself First
When I taught writing to a group of 20 homeschoolers, our final project was to write and illustrate our own books. Because those who teach also must do, I did my own. This is my first book — about my experience with laser surgery. It was a funny, painful experience.
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Don’t Undervalue Online Education
Digital technology can enhance teaching and learning — if used properly Watching the news accounts pressing for students to return to the classroom riles me. I’m not opposed to students returning to the classroom safely; I’m riled because educational technology is getting a bad rap. In this dark pandemic, ed tech should seem bright with […]
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The Coronavirus Is Messing with My Inbox
The world’s move to online education has driven traffic to a website I created in 2009, resulting in a flood of unwanted emails.
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Once an English teacher, always an English teacher…
I had carefully planned and shopped and done everything in my power to avoid shopping on Christmas Eve. When our television broke on Christmas Eve eve, I was afraid, I was very afraid. At this time, my children were young, and shopping on Christmas Eve meant traipsing through desperate crowds, trying to shop while keeping […]
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When being “all there” takes you away from here…
“Wherever you are be all there. Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God.” Sometimes I take this proclamation by Jim Elliot too far. As I attended the graduation ceremony of these “my” seniors, I felt not unlike a parent who had given her children up for adoption just […]
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Resolving to be “all there” …
I have newfound resolve — just in time for 2015.This Christmas season I’m different. Once I had the Christmas lights hung (always more complicated, frustrating, and time-consuming than it should be), I found I wasn’t my humbug self. I joyed each night as dusk came and the windows glowed with their outline of colored lights. The tree […]
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An office of one’s own…
I have always wanted my own office — at home or at work. But until today, that never happened. I have had my own classroom — which isn’t the same. Students seem to think it is their classroom and encroach on my personal space. The school seems to think it is its classroom and schedules […]
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Still a mama…
For months I have been working with colleagues who are mothers of young children, newly entered into childcare situations and suffering the germs and illnesses that come with that. These young moms come to work tired, sharing stories of how little sleep they got the night before because their child was sick. Today is my turn. […]
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Dear new golden sick days…
Sick days, sick days Dear new golden sick days Sniffling and sneezing and hacking cough Kept me at home on a rare day off. Were I a teacher I’d go to work Share all my germs, make my illness worse. But the job I have now I can duty shirk Without hurting a classroom of kids. — (my revised, working girl version of […]
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Confessions of a former school teacher…
Driving to work today — the first day of school — I saw the school maintenance man and his son, a high school senior, wheeling their way to the campus. Ken and Matthew didn’t see me, but I was acutely aware of their car, having seen it day in and day out for years, usually traveling the same roads […]
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Surprised by work…
What surprised me about my first day of work was not what it entailed but the “when.” I had long entertained the desire to work for my alma mater, and by the time my final year of teaching ended this spring, I already had numerous applications in the university’s system, all positions for which I […]
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A teacher’s lament…
It’s the calm after the storm. Exams are taken. Yearbooks are signed. Ceremonies and celebrations applauded. The countdown completed. The final day cheered. Hallways emptied of raucous students. Teachers have finished grading those final exams and stacks of papers, the office staff have mailed final report cards, and the toils and struggles of the school […]
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Hurry up and stop…
I have issues with braking. Back in the early days of our marriage, as I would — rapidly — approach a red traffic light, my facetious husband would say, “Hurry up and stop.” When, in fact, he wished I would slow down and stop. Meanwhile, I was trying to obey the speed limit sign AND the traffic signal. […]
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Needing more pep…
I need to rally some personal pep. Tomorrow our football team heads to the state tournament, the first time in school history. The players are nervous and excited; our small campus is abuzz with hope and joy (in part because we could wear jeans and T-shirts to show school spirit today). In celebration, we had […]
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Changing the world vicariously…
Do you remember the Faberge Organics shampoo commercials from the 1980s? It boasted the simple premise of the doubling effect; one girl uses the shampoo and likes it and tells two friends, who tell two friends, who tell two friends, “and so on and so on and so on…” One shampooer evangelizing the world for […]
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The more we pretend to read…
I went on Facebook, saw I had a number of notifications, clicked to glance at the list, and then clicked “Mark as read.” Don’t ask me what was in the list. Don’t ask me any details. Certainly don’t give me any test over the material. But I did “read” them — about as intentionally as […]
All Things Work Together 