Monthly Archives: January, 2009
Updike
This is my last post this week, truly, but John Updike died, and it made me reread A & P, one of those short stories that just knocks me flat. This year with our eleventh graders, we have this bump period– usually we have seventy minute class periods on even or odd days on a …
Reasons to Feel Good
Whispers and rumbles of economic uncertainty and global unrest seem unavoidable these days, and while so far we have only been marginally affected, it gets harder and harder to think that will remain true. Since I quit soda I’ve been sleeping better and feeling less anxious, and while I’ve never been one for a gratitude …
Lost: One Kitten
We got a kitten as a family present for this past Christmas, a sleek little black kitten we named Rosemary. She had been a stray that a couple took in and fed for a week or so, and then they advertised on Craig’s List, where we saw their ad. She had only been with us …
Abandoned Places
My husband and I met in graduate school in Bowling Green, Ohio, about twenty minutes south of Toledo, maybe an hour south of Detroit, Michigan. It’s funny, because I went to college outside Baltimore, and when I moved to Ohio in the summer of 2000 I had no idea I was exchanging proximity to urban …
The Notebooks
I have a little magnet on my fridge that says, “I Still Read Books!”, which I bought at Atomic Books, where I bought a lot of my favorite magnets (like the one with a disapproving waitress that says “God Knows When You Don’t Tip.” It’s true, you know). Anyway, I’ve been thinking lately that I …
First Day Jitters
We were at a party recently, and a young doctoral student I was talking to said, “I feel so nervous before the beginning of the semester, and then I’m like, what does that mean when I’m pursuing teaching as a career?” My response: “Well, I’m in my eighth year of teaching, and I still feel …
American Lion
There’s been a lot of talk about our new President’s connection to, affinity for, and resemblance to his Illinois forefather, talk which only increased when it came out that Obama has been reading about Lincoln recently, including (but not limited to) Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which …
The Happiness Project (Blogroll Spotlight Series)
I’ve been reading The Happiness Project for at least a year now, and it’s definitely one of my favorite daily reads. Gretchen Rubin is the author of the blog, and the book by the same name comes out late next year. Rubin posts regularly, with quotations, lists of tips, links to other websites and books …
More Presidential Talk
One of the nice features of WordPress is that you don’t need to install blog stat software, because WordPress does it for you. Apparently, a lot of people out there are Googling stuff with “inauguration” in it, oddly enough, along with “teaching the” and “writing about the” and “kids and the.” So I thought I …
Hopes and Dreams
Today as a midterm review exercise, I made a packet for my eleventh grade students including the text of Obama’s 2004 convention keynote speech and MLK’s legendary March on Washington speech. They will have a prose passage or two on their exam to explicate, and what better speeches to look at? I keep thinking that …
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