a blog about teaching, learning, reading, writing

If we were having coffee, I’d ask how your writing is going. I’d tell you that I try to make it a point not to repeat forms or formats more than once during the March Slicing Challenge, but here I am with my second Weekend Coffee Share. I’d confess that this month, I feel more…

There’s a long list of things I love about living in Detroit, but here’s one of my favorites: you’re driving down a street you haven’t been on before, and suddenly there’s the greatest mural in the world painted on a building in front of you. I had this experience last weekend. Driving home from a…

What are you celebrating today?

Since September 2021, my favorite podcast has only released two episodes. There have been periodic promises of more, one-minute teasers that would pop up in the podcast feed and get my hopes up. But then months would go by with nothing. Until yesterday. Yesterday morning, I opened my podcast app to select something to listen…

A six-word memoir with three photos to explain why I couldn’t get off the chaise and go to my bedroom: Late to bed because of Pickles.

Bedtime reading brings out my inner Goldilocks. A bedtime book can’t be too exciting or too slow. It can’t be too demanding or too fluffy. It can’t be stimulating: I do not want to be up past my bedtime because I can’t stop reading–or thinking. But I still need to be engaged. It can’t be…

Natasha at Tending Bulbs has issued the perfect March invitation to all of us to join her in building a dream school of fellow slicers. What would you teach? We’ll have to be a K-12 school, because I teach 12th-grade students. I could maybe teach 11th graders, but that is as young as I want…

If we were having coffee, we would definitely talk about the weather because it’s snowing AGAIN. I like the snow, so I’m not complaining (though I am ready for spring), and we’ve had some bright sunny days in between the clouds. Right now, everything is snow-colored outside: the air, the sky, the roofs of the…

Pickles was never supposed to be cat #9. He was supposed to stay outside with his feral mama and papa and his feral siblings. Here he is the very first time I saw him. Four siblings are tucked under that hosta, protected by Mama, but there goes Pickles venturing down the driveway to attack a…

My teachers’ chats were lively last night as we all stayed up past our bedtimes, waiting for our district to announce a school closure for today. The snow hadn’t even started, and last week’s prediction of eight inches hadn’t amounted to nearly so much. March weather is unpredictable in Michigan. I thought schools might want…