I went through my Dungeons and Dragons phase at such an early age that I was out of it before most young people start theirs. (This meant that I got to experience the tail end of the “devil worship” moral panic surrounding D&D in the eighties, which probably did more than a little to shape me into the person I’ve become today.) Before I could really understand how to use role-playing games as storytelling devices, though, I got burnt out on them, mostly because everyone…
House Democrats Grill Betsy DeVos Over Denying Student Borrower Relief (NPR) Today is the start of Finals Week here, and as has been the case throughout my teaching career, I wound up spending most of the past week trying to coach my students, most of whom are in their first semester of college, through the challenges of this difficult time. Even as someone who enjoyed the academic side of my college experience more than most, I remember all too well the unique stresses that those…
The Rough Draft Diaries with Haley Taylor: “Violins Under the Bed” (wgte.org) There was a popular tweet a few weeks ago about how school spelling bees are traumatic because so many of us can remember when, and how, we got eliminated from them even decades after they happened. I shared my own story from a fifth grade spelling bee almost thirty-five years earlier, when the word I got was “bouquet,” I had the letters lined up in my head the way they should have been,…
Part of my job as an English teacher is to stay current on developments in the language, from Oxford comma debates to ever-changing citation styles. Keeping track of all the “loan words” that seep into English from other languages is a small part of that work, but it’s one of the more enjoyable things I get to do, if only because it helps me learn more about other cultures. It also provides an ongoing example of how languages change over time, and aren’t the static…
As wonderful as Mom was, she wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. She made chili every few weeks, and I never did like it, to the point where I wound up staying away from vegetarian chili recipes for most of my life. After I got here to Wisconsin, though, I knew that I needed to start making good warm-me-up meals I could take to campus with me for lunch and heat up in the microwave, so I bit the bullet and tried making…