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 …

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, …

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 …

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’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 …

I Don’t Even Like Running Though

Alright I pulled myself together and am actually going to write this now. Every so often, I think about that paradox where if you move half of the distance between your location and your destination an infinite number of times, you’ll technically never make it to your destination. According to Google, it’s called “Zeno’s Paradox,” …

I Made a Whale

Instead of blogging today, I made a whale out of old jeans. I have few, if any, regrets.

Death of the Love Letter

As a teacher-in-training, and a product of the public school system myself, I know that one of the questions that teachers must be most prepared to answer is this: “How is this relevant to me?” The question takes several forms, including the classic, “When am I going to use this in real life?”, and my …

Because We Haven’t Written a Feminist Post in a While

“Who’s watching the World Cup today?” asked one of the other coaches at summer league this morning. It was an innocent question; it really was. It’s the kind of question you can ask a group of seven- or eight-year-old girls just to get them excited, not because you actually want to know the answer. There …