Guard Dogs

The two big news stories since I moved from Missouri have been: anti-Semitic lunatic shoots up the Jewish Community Center, and cops shoot teenager who is black and unarmed.  Is that where I am from?  Well, yes.  It is a place that struggles with fear in its own ways. We will always have trouble with […]

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Take A Load Off Annie

Parents versus teachers: we’re sort of on the same team, and sort of not.  When we clash, it’s ugly. I didn’t go into teaching to sabotage or attack students. In fact, it hurts like the dickens when you suggest I haven’t done a good job.  When left unsupervised, about 1/4 of my brain obsessively catalogues […]

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Giving and Having

I woke up this morning to death.  I didn’t cheer it like those kids in DC.  My cat had killed a mouse.  I screamed, and then I laid a towel over the corpse.  My great-grandfather used to say, “It’s not the dead people you need to worry about– it’s the living.”  He was a mortician. […]

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Crosshairs

Of course, nobody told this guy to shoot a Congressional representative.  Still, when I saw Palin’s graphic, I thought of every first-person shooter game with gory blood spurting graphics, and I thought of JFK.  And I know if I found crosshairs drawn over a map of my classroom, I’d consider that a violent threat, because students […]

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