I think I had written about the thousandth, “Sentence fragment!!!!” comment of my teaching career on a stack of papers I’d been grading when I sat back, folded my hands, and thought to myself, “How will these kids survive in the world if they can’t even follow directions?”… As a teacher, I think of my […]
I think we can all identify at least one person we’ve encountered who is an Eleanor Oliphant. To begin, an Eleanor Oliphant can be described as a person in which, from the outside world, is observed to be strange, socially awkward, forward, and quite unfashionable. No one really knows anything about them; they are that […]
As a T.V personality, Fred Rogers often became a person in which the nation looked to in order to gain wisdom and directions for how to live, how to accept self, and how to treat others (a real life Atticus Finch, right?!) In the documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”, Morgan Neville focuses on Fred […]
10. Respond to your text messages all at once: Ok, so let’s talk about the process of responding to text messages. First, you have to grab your phone and unlock it (2 seconds). Then, you have to go to your messaging ap (1 second), click on the message (.5 seconds), read the message (2.5 seconds […]
(As a caveat, this is a set of contemplations–a thought experiment, and is in NO way intended to be a final determination) I’ve definitely been in this position before–where I felt like I was listening to ALL of God’s signs, I was doing EVERYTHING He was telling me to do. I prayed, I was obedient, […]
It is no new concept that we all live busy lives, and in order to withstand our busy-ness, people are always encouraging us to “create margins” so that we have “extra space” in our days to not feel so frantic and busy all of the time. Then we might say to those people, “but how […]
10. Concrete answers pass you onto the next level: On her hometown with Garrett, Becca mentioned one of her frustrations with Arie was that he was never concrete with her–he was always abstract?–so it was important to her that Garrett give her concrete answers. And, to appease her anxieties, Garrett’s concrete answer was, “My job […]
Producers and audiences have a moral responsibility to produce moral T.V.: Because we see T.V. as a reflection of our own realities, we bring the things we see on T.V–the situations, ideas, and character traits, resolutions–into our own lives. (As the documentary states), when Fred Rogers returned home from college and saw T.V. for the first […]
Strangers are REALLY easy for us to think negative and judgmental thoughts about, because, well, we don’t know them, they have no allegiance to us, and we can do what we do naturally–assume the worst intentions. But, assuming the worst intentions leads to negative thoughts, negative thoughts lead to bad moods and stress and anxiety […]
Someone recently asked me, “What are three things you hope to instill in your students?” Of course, if I were in control of my own world, I’d totally instill a love of quality literature (you know, not the Fifty Shades of Grey dime-store novel stuff that seems to always populate the shelves and hit the best […]
