I told my friend I was going to a football game the other night. She’s Miss Sports, so she joked that maybe I was turning over a new leaf of athleticism. “No,” I said. “Because I seriously considered asking Matt if he would mind if I took my Kindle to the game.” I read books,…
I’m tempted to give you my husband’s cell phone number, so you can verify that I am not lying when I tell you that every morning and night of my first year of teaching I said, and I quote, “I cannot do this.” Yesterday, after I covered the computer monitor with an old, pink pillowcase…
There is a window in the door of my classroom, and I’m going to have you look through it to watch my class over this last month. We have been doing one thing. Verb conjugations. Day after day after day the same thing, in preparation for their final exam. First the students had to be…
I published a segment of this post three years ago, but I have extended it and am sharing it again, because this message is on my heart. Pollyana is one of my favorite old movies. A young girl comes to a stuffy, crabby town and transforms it with her cheerful outlook and her ability to…
There have been times when the disappointing turns in my life have been a neck-wrenching 180 degrees–like when I was just sure I would get a teaching job in Killeen, Texas when I graduated from college. There were dozens of positions open. The lady interviewed me and turned me down flat. She told me those…
Lots of talk among my people lately, about tasks we have to do that seem impossible. Like my daughter who is working through senior-level accounting classes. And my mom who temporarily has to fill another role at work, on top of her normal job duties. And my husband who listed off to me weeks of…
Yesterday I got in a very dirty Mitsubishi with my two children and said a teary goodbye to my family in Wyoming. The kids and I settled in for the 12-hour drive back to the north corner of Montana. Always when I start this trip I hope maybe it won’t be 12 hours this time….
There were rumblings in a certain family on New Year’s Day. I won’t say who, but certain people with sermons and other people who were enjoying sleeping in every day and other people who had Spanish class to think about might have been moaning about getting back into the swing of things soon. I thought…
The last time I saw her she was trying to keep up with friends in the hallway. Wait! I can’t run in these shoes, she said. She was beautiful, and then she was in a fatal car crash on Monday night. So this week has brought me once again into the land of the grieving,…
My son brought home a syllabus for his freshman PE class. In it the teacher clearly laid out his grading method. Daily grades were based on a 4-3-2-1-0 scale: 4 Exceeds request and requirements of instructor. Participates without being watched. 3 Participates in class activities. Meets the requirements. 2 Cruises in neutral. Participates only while being…
On Wednesday I woke up at my normal 3:00 a.m. Wrote a blog post. And then stretched out on the couch downstairs to go back to sleep for a few hours, like I do most nights of the week. Except I could not go back to sleep. And on this particular Wednesday I was going…
I will beg my tech-smart brother not to mock me here when I say that I finally got the hang of how to upload pictures from CD to my computer. My kids have been all like, Mom, why haven’t you put your pictures on your computer? And I’m all like, Guys. It wasn’t that long…
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