Thoughts about writing, and the universe.
My husband is not a reader. While I wade up to my eyes through stories, he stays dry. We are different people, and that is fine, but I have wondered for years precisely why he doesn't love to read--to me it seems so natural. To me, it is necessary. He has told me sometimes, that... Continue Reading →
The last part of this week, I have been participating in a virtual teacher training workshop about conceptual learning and inquiry. Nine teachers and the workshop leader have been gathering on Zoom for in-depth discussions of how to reframe learning to promote a deeper conceptual understanding (rather than memorized content) that better enables students to... Continue Reading →
In my first few years of teaching English, when people asked why I had chosen this career, I liked to say that I had chosen it because they paid me to talk about love. This was horribly simplified, delightfully whimsical, and ultimately self-indulgent, I can see now, but it is not entirely untrue. The language... Continue Reading →
A quicker post today. I am the teacher on duty this weekend, and yesterday medical situations kept me down on campus a couple of hours past the norm. I'm also running the last day of a project-week of bread baking with students. Monday I begin oral exams for my English language learner students. It will... Continue Reading →
My sister is, as far as I can tell, a financial genius. I might, with a knowing air, explain what "bonds" are to a class when teaching The Great Gatsby, but in a conversation with my sister, I realize quickly that I speak really with the self-contentment of naiveté. I might know my "bull" and... Continue Reading →
Let me begin this post as clearly as I can, knowing that the later paragraphs will invariably (for I have already written them and know) diverge, get muddy, lose themselves. I'll be clear: Good writing must be readily understandable. Clarity of expression should be a writer's foremost goal. Artistry of language, implied meaning, symbolism--these things... Continue Reading →
Just shy of a month ago, I sat down and set myself a few writing goals. I set a goal for word count and a goal for submissions. A perhaps foolhardy goal for publications too I set. During January, I chipped away at these. Let's make an update of where things stand. I'll share some... Continue Reading →
My junior year of high school, I took an elective English class entitled Philosophy in Literature. We thirty teenagers and one brilliant, grandfatherly teacher crowded into that classroom to sift our way from Bishop Berkeley to Plato's Cave, Bertrand Russell to Kierkegaard to Kant's Categorical Imperative. All of these thinkers were brand new to me,... Continue Reading →
Copyright is of course a blessing for writers--it's there to maintain our rights to our own work, sanctioning those who would copy it or pass it off as their own. Copyright helps keep artistic work a viable industry. But from the other side, the writer who wants to incorporate quotations or references to others' works... Continue Reading →
We arrived back in Norway to an incredible winter pageant. A couple inches of snow was encrusted everywhere by the most overwhelming display of ice crystals I have ever seen. Half and inch to an inch long, flat and shiny, sparkling, brilliant blue, the whole world was growing these crystal shards somehow like metallic mushrooms,... Continue Reading →
Jimmy Kindree 