Relationships
The Giver: Thirteen Years Later
It’s happening. My son is currently reading the first piece of literature that I ever taught. He is reading Lois Lowry’s The Giver, the story of a young boy named Jonas living in a highly controlled community some time in the future. The novel fits into a larger genre of cautionary tales called “dystopian literature.” If a utopia is a society in which everything is perfect, a dystopia is the opposite: everything has gone wrong. But my son doesn’t get this. Yet….
A Word On Grades
Back when I was in graduate school, we learned that C meant “Average” — and guess what? Most students are average. (Not your kids, of course. Your kids are gifted and talented.)…
If My Kid Writes One More Book Report…
I get it. My school district clearly wants our kids to pass the standardized test.
They want a slice of the pie.
But our kids are dying of boredom….
Post-Museum Trippy Lessons on Drugs
Last Sunday, I took my 11-year old to see the recent exhibit at our local museum called “Psychedelic Art: Hallucinogens and their Impact on the Art of the 1960s.”
I could hardly have been less prepared….
Teacher's Pets: It's Not What You Think
They say some folks are dog people and some are cat people.
Sadly, I guess we are the people who can’t be either….
Lessons From Nan, Who Passed On June 16, 2004
I will always remember Nan, wearing a snazzy pair of purple pants, sitting on the gold couch in my parents’ living room. Just sitting quietly, patiently, watching my brother and me as we made up games or put on little shows. Many years later, she would sit in the same place, doze off an on, awaking with an almost apologetic smile. Agatha Christie once said, “I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable . . . but through it all, I know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.” I believe Nan knew this, too….
Functional Illiteracy: The Repost
People who know me know I’m struggling this semester. I try to explain how my students seem weaker this year; how I can’t get them to use capital letters (or, in some cases, how I can’t get them to stop randomly capitalizing words that don’t need to be capitalized); how they won’t stop writing “im” instead of “I’m”; how I can’t get them to stop using the letter “u” when they mean the word “you.”…
My Annual Birthday Poem: A Terribly Self-Indulgent, Truly Narcissistic Post
Today is my birthday. I’m um… a year older than I was last year. ;-)…
Biting Off More Than I Can Chew
Whenever I take on a project, where I am in a leadership role, where there are deadlinu couldes, where visible, public failure is possible – I get positively crazed. The desire for perfection makes me hustle to work, work, work – and in striving for perfection, the craziness kicks in. …
Cursive as a Font Option?
In the 18th and 19th centuries, cursive was one’s special signature. It distinguished one individual from another. The most elite received special training, and possessing a “fair hand” was considered a desirable trait for both men and women. By the 1960s, a standardized method called D’Nealian Script had been introduced into schools all over the United States, and handwriting became more homogenized. I didn’t know any of this, of course. All I knew was that during “cursive time,” each of us learned to write the same way: on thin, gray paper that consisted of rows of lines: two straight continuous horizontal lines with one dashed line in the middle. We sat with our pencils poised “at the basement” of the line ready to “go all the way up to the attic” or to stop “at the first floor.”…