Blog

One cold winter day when I was in second grade, a kid on the playground dared our schoolmate, Becky, to put her tongue on the metal tetherball pole. She didn’t believe him when he told her that her tongue would get stuck to it. She found out the hard way that he was correct. I remember how Mrs. Jenison ran over with a cup of coffee and poured it on Becky’s tongue to unstick it from the pole...

The final bell has rung, and all the students are gone for the day. A peaceful silence has fallen throughout the middle school. Now is the twilight time of day for educators — that time after students have left the building, but before the maintenance workers come through to clean rooms and hallways...

An acquaintance of mine recently posted pictures on social media of all the meals she had prepared for the next month. She said how easy it was. You simply decide all the meals you want to prepare. Then you make lists of all the ingredients you’re going to need. Next, buy all the ingredients, including storage containers...

Too late! I’ve already slid. I confess. I’ve been staying up way past my bedtime, watching ridiculous things on Netflix. (Let me save you some time here: Do NOT watch the movie, The Ice Road. Ugh. What a painful two hours of my life I wasted on that one.) As a consequence of staying up, I’ve been sleeping late...

I’m working summer school through the end of July at Washington High School in Cedar Rapids. It’s not our home school, and certainly not our home classroom, but we have to make do with what’s available to us. The first thing we did when we were assigned our classroom was to start shoving tables and chairs around to make it more conducive for our needs and for our students’ needs...