I. No one needs to ask the origin of my neighborhood’s name: Deer Park. Deer walk the streets of Deer Park, Ohio, like humans have yet to take over. They are the living ghosts of nature, sleeping in front yards, staring at you with a tense readiness when you walk past. The penance the deer…
When the Paperless Movement was in full force, I was fatalistic. Going totally digital was inevitable. And like anyone who needs to prepare for a new world, I started readying my supplies, or, in this case, getting rid of them. As we now know, the Paperless Movement didn’t quite take. Though cardboard boxes are the…
I got into teaching because I was an educational rebel. I was a late bloomer, and while I was a curious person interested in many things, I didn’t put much stock into formal education. I blinded myself to keeping my eyes open for anything by keeping my eyes open to only a bubble’s worth of…
Link to the explanation of this series. I watched a teenager, probably the same age as some of the students I teach, raise their camera up, thumb tapping the screen, and pan it around the cascading lights swirling around on the building in front of us. “There’s another one,” I thought. The teenager wasn’t alone….
As a high school English teacher, I’m always wondering what my writing hobby has to do with my job. Yes, I do all of the stereotypical things an English teacher does: tries to write novels and short stories, tries to write essays that may be of note somewhere, reads as if our eyes evolved to…
The Question Through all of the various cultural arguments about what is offensive and who sees the world the right way, I have realized that a word has slipped through: “protein.” I think I first heard this neologism or reframed use of the word from some popular restaurant that will probably dawn on me as…
Reading for a Refresh Deep into the summer, yet a few weeks before school, the professional development books I stacked on the far reaches of my home desk morph from a thing to politely ignore to a an interesting to-do list. This year, I have a book about Socratic seminars, three books about writing, one…
Environmental Control Usually, when you grow up with something, like a childhood of enjoying not-so-pleasant looking ripe bananas–speckled oxidation brown, far from a pristine green or yellow–it becomes normalcy, a state of comfort and not-surprise. It’s eating around the mold. It’s sleeping without worrying that your body will roll out of bed onto the floor….
The Fears That Bind Us Coming up any sort of stairs was my greatest childhood fear. Sure, I wouldn’t be happy about going down to a dark basement: I’d race for the lights and move slowly around corners. But, for some reason, I felt like going upstairs was like defying a monster’s plan, like you…
Made a YouTube video about rock climbing fall training: