When I was a child, I thought that artificial Christmas trees were the strangest things. Why display a plastic tree when the real thing was all around, just waiting to be turned into Christmas? The only people I knew who had artificial trees were the very elderly, and it seemed a sad sign of giving…
Image CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0 Steve Rotman on Flickr.com I am joining Trina Haase at Trinarrative for a daily haiku challenge in December. Each day for this haiku challenge, I try to read two or three haiku, learn something about the form, and write a haiku. It doesn’t take very long to read or write a haiku, so…
ALL THE BOOKS. And not just the free and discounted ones in the Exhibit Hall. All the ones I learn about at different sessions. All the ones by authors who present. All the ones I spy fellow English teachers reading in the halls in between sessions. I don’t travel with an extra empty suitcase as…
When I was younger, I believed vacations were for being busy. There was plenty of time for rest at home. Vacations were for waking up early, going to sleep late, being constantly on the move, memorizing the early open and late close days of every tourist attraction to squeeze the most new experiences into each…
I have 78 books checked out right now from one of the three libraries I use. I only have 12 checked out from another one, but those twelve are all seven-day loans with no renewals. From my campus library, I have 17 books checked out, and those have a wonderfully long loan time (six months!!)…
I first learned the term “soft start” in one of Sara Ahmed’s books. It refers to easing into the school day with gentle choice activities–reading, writing, talking, playing, making. No rigorous academic work to remind kids that school is supposed to be hard. No mindless busy work to get kids quiet and compliant. Kelsey Corter describes…
Believe it or not, I wasn’t looking for another cat. We had eight already, and yes, they’re all indoor cats, and even though I really, really, REALLY love cats, even I thought that eight was enough. Mostly I worried about upsetting the delicate balance of the social order by adding more. I think that cats…
Reading… Emma’s Rug, a picture book recommended for a lesson on rereading in Franki Sibberson and Karen Szymusiak’s Still Learning to Read, and An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic, a wonderfully erudite memoir by Daniel Mendelsohn ostensibly about the semester his 81-year-old father enrolled in a seminar on The Odyssey that Mendelsohn…
My son woke up uncharacteristically late yesterday morning, which made him cranky. He doesn’t like to miss the morning any more than I do. “What would you like for breakfast?” I asked. I love everything about eating breakfast and everything about making breakfast. If I had my way, all three meals in the day would…
I always have lots of plans for summer writing. Stacks of new notebooks and the only pens I can write with. A couple of free professional development writing opportunities that should keep me in writing ideas and inspirations (#100DOSW18, Teachers Write). A lack of other obligations and time commitments that makes writing sound appealing and…
