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Category: Autobiographical

The Magnetic Strip

Posted on September 13, 2022September 14, 2022 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

A Teacher’s Non-American School Experience “No logos or anything like that,” said my mom. She had just explained to me that we needed to take a bunch of precautions for our “vacation.” These precautions seemed more like we were becoming refugees rather than tourists. We were not to wear anything that would pin us as…

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Semester of Slow

Posted on March 13, 2022March 13, 2022 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

Virtual Tools, Real Classroom When you are stressed, practicality is a religion. At the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year, after we went totally virtual when the pandemic hit in March 2020, I was a bit unsettled. We were all starting to live with the virus. Still, the memory of full-on pandemic anxiety–memories like studiously…

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Pushed Up a Mountain

Posted on February 6, 2022February 6, 2022 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

I. My Brazilian friend had never seen snow. I couldn’t fathom such a perspective, watching him gawk out the window of the bus that was driving us from the airport to a hotel in Switzerland. We all lived in England, attending the same American school, though many of us were not American. It was February,…

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The Neighborhood Anarchists

Posted on January 17, 2022January 25, 2022 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

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…

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Mid-Career Teaching Revelation

Posted on January 2, 2022January 25, 2022 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

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…

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Shaken

Posted on July 19, 2021January 9, 2022 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

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….

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Alone at Whistling Arch

Posted on July 12, 2021January 9, 2022 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

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…

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Above the Bolt

Posted on April 29, 2021July 12, 2021 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

Made a YouTube video about rock climbing fall training:

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Emoting Whilst Driving Vehicles

Posted on March 14, 2021 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

Preamble In a 24 hour period over the course of the 26th and 27th of February, I was the victim of two forms of vehicular emoting. The first was the “daring” sort of vehicular emoting. Not quite the most one can do with anger whilst seat-belted in a moving vehicle, but an act that carried…

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The Lunch Walk

Posted on March 13, 2021January 9, 2022 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

The Industrial Nopes One of the reasons I became a teacher–and I know this is not what I should be saying–was so that I wouldn’t have to work in a cubicle. It was at the beginning of my teenagedom that I had suspected that the cubicle environment would not be my bag. I don’t remember…

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TJ Wilson is an English Teacher who writes on the side.
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