Tag: students
-
The Dress
While the fall semester of 2020 was widely and rightly hailed as crushing for both teachers and students, it also presented glories. For me, one glory was a 17-year-old student named Miranda who enrolled in my Writing for Social Media class. Every week, I grinned at my screen as I read her work; the character…
-
Do You Have Time for Me?
This is the story of a student, and this is the story of a teacher. You will want something heartwarming, uplifting, and transformative. Perhaps this is not that. *** At the end of January 2018, I returned from five months of living and teaching in the country of Belarus where I was a Fulbright Scholar.…
-
Who, Me?
My friend Helen, a colleague at the university, arranged the whole thing. Weeks ago, Helen pinned down a date when I’d be free to visit her son Sasha’s gymnasium (an academically advanced K-12 school) — the same gymnasium she, herself, attended — and spend some time talking to the English teachers. The idea was born…
-
Butt Hurt: Tuesday, February 28
Gack! Here I’d hauled my cookies downtown and raced breathlessly into the lobby, readying myself for a much-needed yoga class, only to be greeted by a sign on the counter announcing a class cancellation. What made it worse was that I’d known the teacher couldn’t find a sub and there would be no class, but…
-
Five in Five: Saturday, January 27
I was walking along today, listening to the Atlanta Monster podcast, when I peeped over my shoulder and was startled by a creeper on the path. Seeking to defuse the threat of him, I married him 18+ years earlier and fell in lockstep with his gait; Atlanta Monster is a podcast exploring the murders of…
-
Nobody Listens
The last months have cast me into many varieties of stress and time-crunchedness, and whenever I do have free time near a keyboard, there is always non-blog writing that needs to be tackled. I miss blog writing. Lately, I’ve put seven minutes per week towards a long-suffering blog post, which basically means I get half…
-
Celebrate the Student
This week, I start my 25th year of teaching college English. The brain, she boggles. Brain has been along for the entire ride–since the first day my clammy hands pushed open the door of a classroom on the University of Idaho campus. Clutching a stack of fresh-off-the-ditto-machine, purple-inked syllabi to my chest, protecting my carefully dot-matrix-printed Instructions…