Archive for June 2022

It’s a challenging time to be a teacher. Coming off three years of teaching in a pandemic, children have enormous social, emotional, and academic needs. Many are struggling with trauma, the effects of prolonged isolation, and grief. Teachers, too. For many of us, while our friends have been working remotely or in highly mitigated environments,…

On Tuesday night, I was in Boston while Charlie played in his first playoff game of the season. I was sitting in the audience at a Moth StorySLAM, waiting for my name to be called. A client based in Boston knew that I had planned to attend the slam and wanted to finally meet me…

It’s not a restaurant’s primary or even secondary responsibility to provide crayons to its patrons, but when you’re kind enough to offer crayons to children, it takes almost no effort to get it right. This is why Charlie was astounded by the selection of crayons offered to him last weekend: Nine in total. Five different…

On Saturday 31 members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front were arrested near an Idaho pride event after they were found packed into the back of a U-Haul truck with riot gear. The men were standing inside the truck – faces covered by white balaclavas – when Coeur d’Alene police stopped the U-Haul and…

We need as much positivity in our lives as we can muster. Sadly, our brains retain and overvalue negative feedback over positive feedback, so we require about six positive statements to counteract one negative statement. That is an incredibly difficult ratio to achieve. Added to this unfortunate biological truth are all the haters in our…

In a 4-3 decision at the Ohio Supreme Court, a judge’s decision to add six more years to a person’s sentence after the individual called them a “racist ass bitch” during sentencing was deemed unjustified and has been reversed. The defendant, Manson Bryant, was convicted of aggravated burglary and aggravated robbery and initially was sentenced…

We have a new rule in my classroom, proposed by a student, that my students and I fully support: No more beverage talk. Beverage talk is boring. If you’re telling us about your English breakfast tea or your fruity summer drink or your vitamin-infused water or your hot chocolate, you’re boring us. Beverage talk sucks.…

As a person who receives a lot of feedback from folks online – and not always kind, generous, or even coherent – I often have to decide how to respond. Listen closely, because this took me a long time to learn this lesson, but it has served me well: The non-response is oftentimes the best…

As a Boy Scout, I spent hundreds of nights camping outdoors, in tents, lean-tos, and under the stars. As a result, I have also spent hundreds – if not thousands – of days and nights sitting beside a fire, cooking food, trying to stay warm, and passing the time. Had you asked me if the…

Back on March 23, 2020, I posted the music video for Bruce Springsteen’s “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day” in my class’s Google Classroom. During our first online meeting, I told my students that this pandemic would eventually end, masks would become a thing of the past, vaccines would protect us, and life would return to…