handwritten on May 3, 2019
Today I was driving home from school and flooded by the thoughts of all I had to do this weekend, out of the corner of my eye I noticed I was driving through what looked like paradise. The grass was literally emerald green. The light was shining. There were flowers blooming from the trees, and I felt this sense of enchantment that I have not felt in quite some time. What really caught my eye though were the dandelions sporadically growing here and there inside this emerald beauty. Little spurts of sunshine creating a pathway on the green runway.
My mind was immedietely brought back to a poem I had modeled for my students earlier (a Haiku actually) where I took the topic of "weeds" and...
handwritten on May 2, 2019
"Go the Extra Mile"
"The Journey of a Mile Begins with One Step.."
"Before you criticize...walk a mile in my shoes"
I've always found whimsy in shoes. Partially, I think this is because shoes tend to reflect our personalities as people. The shoe someone is wearing says a lot about them. Always polished? Perhaps incredibly organized. Mismatched? Perhaps detail-oriented in a different way.
For me, I tend to wear out my shoes until you cannot walk with them anymore. I've worn shoes with the soles flapping and detached, the spring rain seeping through. I've worn shoes that have been worn from so many times of running and hitting the pavement that there is simply no traction left. Shoes without...
handwritten on May 1, 2019
I'm not sure what it is, but more than ever, I do feel like we are creating a society where we all live in separated bubbles. And, sometimes, even when bubbles bump into eachother softly, the bubble-makers don't even feel that potential tap of another world or a new environment, a challenged idea or a new situation. If you have ever seen a young child play outside with a large bubble wand, you see the whimsy. It's that feeling of creating something so mystical, so empowering that every stage from the making to the watching to the chasing to the popping is something to behold. And I think what's even more, is watching those youngsters chase the bubble to see where it goes and where it flows...
handwritten on April 30, 2019
In an attempt to pick my final novel for my literature class this year, I read multiple books and with a cup of coffee and a book in my hands, I found the perfect conclusion to an extraordinary year with a book about a cow.
In order to not be too lengthy, I will give a brief synopsis of the book here. The book Moo is a prose book by one of my favorite authors (Creech.) She has written multiple novels in verse-each one more whimsical than the next. But what struck me about this one was the simplicity of the topic. Two children move from the city to rural Maine and befriend a cow. This cow, without even speaking, speaks more about life than any character I have witnessed in any other book. ...
handwritten on April 29, 2019
As teachers of literature, we are always asked to focus on the "how" and "why" questions. However, I noticed today while I was letting steam come out of my ears during my afterschool club, that sometimes "how" and "why" are really not the critical questions we should be asking. Mondays are the days of speeches and forgotten notecards. And every time a student forgets their notecards, I always aske the following questions..
"Why did you forget your notecards?"
"How did you forget your notecards again?"
"Why is it that your notecards are not in your backpack?"
And funny enough, after the third person forgot their notecards this week, instead of getting angry, I finally resorted to "what"...
