on this day

When my brother was a baby, my parents (like the new parents in the mid-1990s that they were) bought a video camera. To give you an idea of how long ago this was, it wasn't even one of those clunky old digital cameras that took videos at the same quality as an early 2000s flip …

i did basic math for this post and it took me a while

Among the (many) things I’m supposed to be writing this summer is my personal statement. So true to form, I have a couple of rambling pages in Google Docs about how great I think science is. Probably about a paragraph and a half from this is going to make it into the actual personal statement …

what type of bread are you? and other identity-shaping questions

As I was scrolling through Facebook looking for a good way to procrastinate on writing this blog, I stumbled across this gem of a meme: First off, I literally laughed out loud for like 5 minutes straight. Mostly because I have legit taken a survey that told me what kind of bread I am. (Sourdough, …

On my lack of favorite things

In kindergarten, my favorite colors were red, pink, and purple. There was this poster hanging on the wall of my room back then, a row of cartoon crayons with their colors printed on them. The red, the pink, and the purple crayons were next to each other; and since I couldn’t choose just one, they …

Reflections over orzo salad

The other day, I was chopping peppers for my orzo salad (go me), and a thought occurred to me. If I could do this, if I could teach and cook and go to the gym and drink tea before bed every day, I think I could live a happy and satisfied life. I have points …

on my lack of a five-year plan

I totally had a five-year plan for most of high school, even if I didn’t know it. This was made very simple by the expectation that I would go to college--there was never really a question of what I would generally be doing for the next few years. That isn’t the case anymore, though. In …

Pieces

There's this test that I'm taking as a way to procrastinate on taking the GRE called the CSET, and before I go on, can somebody please tell me why all standardized tests insist on having acronyms as names? No one knows what the acronym stands for anyway, so it'd be much more fun to just call …

I mean, this is technically a blog post

It’s been awhile since I last thought about change. Maybe it doesn’t seem like it, because tbh the last time I blogged (a year ago), I probably wrote about change. But trust me, it’s been awhile. I always assume that I do not like change, for essentially the same reasons that I don’t like playing …

I’m not sure what this is about but I wrote it

In the teacher world, one of the things we talk about all the time is the idea of conceptual change. The gist of this is that when good teaching occurs, you're not just giving kids facts to memorize - you're providing them with experiences that update their mental models, or way of explaining a concept …

More Attempts to Solve The Problem

There’s a word in Danish, hygge, that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Hygge is one of those cool words that doesn’t actually have a direct English translation, but instead, describes some abstract and complex emotion or phenomenon. The closest translation of hygge that we can come up with is the feeling of coziness …