A few days ago, I read a thoughtful article written by one of my grad school professors and mentors, Dr. Emily Isaacs. In the article (www.chronicle.com) Isaacs posits that many students are showing up to college campuses without the “skills, habits and behaviors” they need to be successful in college. She makes a potent argument that college professors need to carve out time in their courses to teach what she terms “studenting” skills. She maintains that not only is this an effective way to help smart, creative students be more successful in college but also a way to help level the playing fi ..read more

Most of us understand emotional “triggers” to be those external stimuli that elicit an intense and unwanted emotional response. A trigger can be an image, a conversation, a song or any vague or specific sensory sensation that provokes an involuntary response in our autonomic nervous system, often understood as a fight or flight response. Despite some widespread controversy around "trigger warnings” and not just a little bit of eye-rolling in certain factions, there is ample scientific evidence that for many people, triggers do, in fact, provoke a significant negative reaction, which is not onl ..read more

Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? ~Mary Oliver It’s New Year’s Day and at the risk of sounding morbid, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that time is running out. Literally and metaphorically, we are all moving through our lives and rapidly spending down the precious and finite—yet undisclosed—ration of time we have been granted here on this earth. It’s a sobering thought, really, but not necessarily a tragic one. It’s more like a consistent and incontrovertible tr ..read more

The Christmas mornings of my childhood were magical. I remember my brothers and sister and I creeping into the living room at some insanely early hour, eagerly and exuberantly exploring our Christmas stockings and happily discovering our big unwrapped gift from Santa, never tagged, but always easy to identify which one was for which kid. And then we’d wait for our Mom to get her coffee so that we could dig into our pile of wrapped gifts. I can still see her sweet face, sleepy and happy, while she sipped her coffee, legs curled under her on the couch, as we opened our gifts one by one. We were ..read more

I had an exceptionally good week last week. Positive things happened in my classroom; my tennis team enjoyed a couple of big unexpected wins, including an upset in our state tournament; and I am finally feeling healthy after two weeks of an annoyingly persistent head cold. My students are lovely this year and even though it’s only the second week of October, there seems to be an unusual level of good energy and productivity in my classes. I have the best work family, with endless camaraderie and unconditional support, and I get to spend most beautiful fall afternoons outside on the tennis cour ..read more

I really love teaching high school seniors. Although I’ve taught just about every grade and level of high school English over the past 35 years, in recent years, my teaching career has landed in a spot that seems to fit me just right: ELA 12. For my students, I’m one of their last stops in high school and not only does my class become one of their last chances to boost critical literacy skills, but it’s also a kind of a boot-camp for the future. What do seniors in high school need to be successful? How can I use my time with them to help them to become more effective readers, writers and think ..read more

To be honest, I really didn’t know anything about ChatGPT until I read an article in the New York Times last January announcing that NYC Public Schools had banned the chatbot on all school networks and devices. I’m like, damn, what is this thing and why don’t I know about it? And, if its so powerful—and so perilous—to education that the largest school system in America felt like it had to shut it down, I really need to learn more about it. So, a few days later, I logged onto Open AI and started experimenting. After playing around for a couple of weeks and asking simple questions and receiving ..read more

One of my favorite characters in all of literature lives in the coming-of-age novel, A Separate Peace by John Knowles. In the novel, a character named Phineas (Finny for short) comes to life through the eyes of the protagonist, Gene Forrester. Finny is everything that Gene is not: A teenage boy without pretense, fear or hesitation, who lives honestly with exuberance and unbridled enthusiasm, habitually finding fun and joy in just about every situation. Finny is a fearless adventurer and an exceptional athlete, who is widely considered to be the very best athlete at the fictional boarding schoo ..read more

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. ~T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land Saudade is a gorgeous little word I encountered recently during a trip to Portugal. It describes a sort of deep longing for something you love, but don’t possess. It is said to reflect the emotional temperament of the Portuguese people, or maybe even their way of being, and according to people who know about such things, it does not have an exact English translation.  Although saudade (pronounced sau-daad) probably derives from th ..read more

In case you haven’t heard, Lebron James recently broke Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s long-standing NBA career scoring record. It was a big deal, of course, because that record, which Abdul-Jabbar had claimed from Wilt Chamberlain in 1984, had seemed all but unbreakable for these past 39 years. It seemed fitting that it happened while James was wearing a Los Angeles Lakers uniform, just as Abdul-Jabbar had been so many years ago, and fitting, too, that Abdul-Jabbar was on hand to celebrate the moment and to congratulate James. Naturally, he did so in the humble and gracious manner which has become as m ..read more