I walked into my dream job at 22 years old–unlike many others educators who substitute for a year, work .86 contracts, start at emerging districts and work their way up, teach half one subject and half another to get their foot in the door, I started in a big district, I was gifted with my […]
I recently watched ‘The Last Word’, which is a movie about a lady (Harriet, played by Shirley MacLaine) who is perceived as a control freak, realizes that no one likes her, and asks a writer (Anne, played by Amanda Seyfried) to write Harriet’s pre-obituary. The movie itself is predictable (you know that Anne, who is […]
Like everyone else in the world, I recently started watching 13 Reasons Why. I have not finished the entire show yet, so I cannot give an official reaction of the whole series (it is like a book–I can’t tell you if Edna Pontiller’s walk into the ocean in The Awakening was selfish or a beautiful […]
My Bible study just finished Lysa Terkeurst’s latest study, “Uninvited”, and overall, we thought it was a timely and relevant topic–as we learned, we can label way more of our experiences in life as rejections than we originally thought. I enjoyed the video sessions with Lysa–my favorite part is that she filmed it in the […]
A reader wrote to me the other day about a struggle she/he is having with his/her significant other, and I really felt passionately enough about the issue to respond via public blog post. The issue went something like–“I was diagnosed with [a life changing illness] he/she doesn’t want to take care of me, so he/she […]
The world is full of binaries (light versus dark, good versus evil, up versus down, heaven versus hell, right versus wrong, conservative versus liberal, inside versus outside, winners versus losers, stationary versus movement) and the tension that exists between my emotional mind and my logical mind seems to be no excuse; while both must exist, […]
In English class, we teach many stories about brave men who return home from war as victors and heroes. In The Odyssey, we have Odysseus who’s bravery comes from his abilities to out smart and over power the gods, and overcome the obstacles, his commitment to sacrificing and saving his men so they can return […]
A few weeks ago, I sat in this professional development class. The topic was student feedback, and how we as educators, can use strategies to increase student learning without also increasing teacher time. The strategies were great–things like asking your students to write a checklist before you grade, so you know what kind of feedback […]
As we all know, time is something that passes us by quicker than we would like, and one of my favorite things about writing is that that writing allows us to capture a suspended moment in time. Its always enlightening, and quite entertaining, to look back through my high school journals and see a suspended […]
The more I think about it, the more I realize how opposite these two terms really are. Between my Bible study and church, we’ve been spending a lot of time talking about tithing and giving: “we should store extra so that we can give to those in need”, “we should be humble in our spendings […]
