The Everyday

After teaching high school for five years, I’ve learned a hard lesson: students don’t remember the things that I want them to remember. I’ve spent countless hours explaining the facts. I’ve explained the difference between participle and infinitive phrases, expounded on Hemingway’s terse prose and his effect on modern writing, and examined what makes To Kill a Mockingbird an American Classic. While some students managed to file some of these literary principles away in their brains, I’ve found that a majority of my students don’t look back at our time together and define it by the facts I’ve attempted to instill in them. They normally remember some semi-idiotic story I told about me and my high school friends, or they remember a piece of advice I gave them about their relationship with their high school sweetheart. Every year it seems like I have the same conversation with different students. They’ll tell me a story about something I don’t remember doing or saying, and we’ll have a good laugh about it. The conversation normally starts something like this:

A Paragraph or Two

I didn't write this to complain...But it is crunch time at school, and I have about 35 more research papers to grade before Christmas break. I feel like my mind is going to break from self induced stress. It's like a anthropomorphic research project punched a hole in my face and my brains mix with blackred goo pour out of the hole (the thought reminds me of a garbage pail kid card).

This is me letting it go...

I was teaching John Updike's shory story "A&P" this afternoon to my English 102 class. One of the students, a thin-faced woman in her mid-to-late-thirties, asked me where I taught full-time.

Hesitant, I responded, "Valley Fellowship Christian Academy."

Her mouth formed a half-cocked smile and she kinda chuckled, covering her face with her book.

Befuddled, I asked, "What?"

She just repeated her action as if I were some peon.

Writing With My English 101 Class

I wrote with my English 101 class last night and a woman in the class shared about her dead son. It was amazing to see someone so vulnerable. First class, first free write—she slits her wrist and bleeds for 26 strangers to watch. When I saw this, I was amazed. Her freedom empowered me. I was renewed, re-energized, ready to write about myself. Not teacher me, not friend me, but me in the purest sense of the word. I was ready to write about the 16 year old me that lost his older brother and held his hand as he breathed his last breath. About the me that sat with my wife as we found out that we lost our first child before it was born. Willing to open up. Willing to be honest. Willing to share.

I'm not sure what it all means, but I had to write about it.

On Writing Educational Philosophy Papers

In the last seven years of my educational career, I’ve written at least eight different educational philosophy papers. Each paper was a honing experience—a draft of a draft if you will. Each draft more plainly articulated a clearer picture of my educational values, and when I was asked to write my philosophy for the National Writing Project, I was seriously thinking about breaking the latest draft out and have another go at it. I mean it would be easier, right?