Today, I spent a number of hours propped up at my dining room table, staring at my laptop. This is not much different from how I spent the majority of the summer, but this time I was staring at MS Word and not at Netflix. I say propped up, because delicate and graceful flower that…

Mere days before Kickoff commences (the beginning of the TFA year, of course), I find myself faced with a conundrum. A musical conundrum. My cohort has been asked to send our MTLDs a meaningful song; this is kind of cool and different, a laudable departure from our usual pattern of PD. However, I find it…

Mind blown by that simile? Today is July 12th.  On August 13th (one month + one day from today, in case that wasn’t clear), a brand new troop of precious angels will be beating down my classroom door. So basically, I’m nesting.  Here’s how: Making 12,000 new posters. Crocheting an afghan (it’s soothing…) Checking out…

I have this new resolution.  I’m only writing things when I actually have something to say.  This includes text messages (I don’t really need to reply if you sent me, “k”), emails (if there isn’t a TFA “action item,” I don’t need to take action), and blog posts. The school year is now well and truly…

This is a new level of restlessness to which I am unaccustomed. Nothing is more appealing to a teacher than the thought of summer vacation.  It seems blissfully limitless, peaceful, restorative, and a slew of other adjectives that cannot be applied to the school year.  For 10 months, summer was the somewhat seductive light at…

I never thought that this post would be the most challenging writing assignment of my year. I have composed it in my head thousands of times.  Somewhere in the universe’s negative space where things you don’t write down go, there is the triumphant “Closed That Achievement Gap, Y’all” version I imagined during Institute, the “I…

I need make only one more peanut butter sandwich.  I only have to eat two more, which means that in three days I can eat an infinite array of lunch possibilities if I so choose.  I only have to hear my phone go off at 5 AM two more times.  I only have to limit…

When I was thirteen, I sang the baritone part in Seasons of Love in my summer arts camp women’s chorus (it is a boon to be vocally versatile at times). If you weren’t born to be a musical theater geek, you might not know the song by name.  It’s the one that asks, “how do…

You can tell a lot about a school by the state of its lockers. At my school, our lockers are a strange shade of blue, that even now as I stare out at them from my classroom door, I can’t find an appropriate adjective to describe.  Many of them are lock-less, as their owners have…