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This is the archive page for my blog. I am now putting my writing here, and I have a newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

Unlearning "Never Make The Activity The Objective"

I am terrible at science. I know that lots of people say they are terrible at subjects and are just being modest, but lots of people did not accidentally spill titration mixtures all over their lab partner's faces. You know how in chemistry classrooms there are those eye-flushing faucets that you're supposed to use in case of emergencies, but you've never seen anyone actually use? Yeah. I am the reason those are there.

Unlearning "100 Percent Compliance"

When I look through the folder of photos on my computer from the past five years, there's this one that is especially sad. At the time it was taken, the picture made me happy. I even had a big print made of it, and I hung it up in my classroom. It was a picture of "100 percent compliance" -- a Doug Lemov teaching strategy that had been reiterated to me throughout multiple professional development sessions to the point that it had basically become part of my personal dogma. ("I believe in peace, love, equal rights for all, that salted caramel is the best flavor of ice cream, and that children should always demonstrate 100 percent compliance.")

LEAPs Backward: High-Stakes Tests Are Seriously Failing Children

If you are a teacher in Louisiana, this is a big week for you. All week, you will have just two words on your mind; you will wake up every morning with two words on your lips; you will hear two words echoing throughout the hallways at whichever school you happen to work: LEAP Test.

Introverts & Cats #4

Friday night.

Laurel, Mississippi (Part 2)

Early-on in our travels across Laurel, I got lost. That's normal: I have absolutely no sense of direction whatsoever. Just, none. Once I was traveling from New Orleans to Tennessee and I ended up in Texas. On the train going back to Laurel, I got lost on my way from the observation car back to my seat. (Like, actually lost. Like, I had to talk to someone about it, because I could not figure out how to get back to my seat.) Not only am I bad at directions, I also always insist that I know exactly where I am going. I know what you're thinking, but no, I am not a stereotypical man on a sitcom. This is just the way I am.

Laurel, Mississippi (Part 1)

I spent the weekend doing something I have always wanted to do: I took a train to a town I knew nothing about, for no reason other than just to do it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Pitches Television Pilots To Cartoon Network

Title: "Adventure Time and Its Inevitable Existential Consequences"

Logline: This show will focus on the existential crises and inner anguishes of Finnikov, a childlike adult man who plots many violent and reckless adventures (primarily murder) just to see if he has the ability to feel anything. Episodes will shift perspectives between Finnikov and his dog, Jakeovich, who may be a figment of Finnikov’s imagination.

Author Postcards

In lieu of a full post today, here are some watercolors of famous authors and some quotes they have said. Can you guess all of them?

I'll be selling these soon, to raise a little money for Neutrons/ Protons. Be on the lookout.

Enneagram

A few years ago, my roommates introduced me to the Enneagram, which is a little like the Myers-Briggs, but with less of the fuzzy science nonsense and more of this kind of spiritual pagan thing going for it. So, in other words, I'm basically obsessed with it and I want it to be my husband.

Swamp

I like to tell this story whenever I go to the swamp, about how a friend and I used to go there in the depths of summer to draw the alligators. Once we went and sat down to draw this alligator that wasn't so far from us, and we'd look down to draw, and then look up at the alligator, and every time we looked back up, the alligator was a little closer to us than it had been before. Nothing had seemed to have changed; the alligator had just gotten closer.

Individually Together

If you haven't seen "The Lego Movie" yet, drop everything you are doing and go see it. I'm serious. It's the best movie I have ever seen in my entire life, and all of mankind should watch it, internalize its many messages, and make the world a better place by application. Ignore that Lego is kind of a shitty corporation, and that the movie has a stupid name. Just ignore those things. Everything else about this film is extraordinary.

Dear Cats

I have two cats. They are (adorably) named after jazz musicians (Satchmo and Coltrane), and they basically dominate my life. There was an article in The New York Times this weekend about how cats should not be allowed to go outside, because they are murdering birds, and spreading disease, and for lots of other reasons. This article successfully made me feel like a terrible person, but I am never going to make my cats live indoors. That would be like inviting your boyfriend to move in: the relationship would deteriorate almost instantaneously.

Racist

Five years ago, I sat in an old, falling-apart high school, not teaching two 19-year-old boys about reading. I was supposed to be teaching them about reading, but the other six kids in the class had failed to show up that day, and morale was low. It was incurably hot, and the room we were in didn't have air conditioning. After going through the motions of phonics exercises, we had stretched out in front of a jangly plastic box fan and were talking about the rapper Juvenile.

Family Math Night

Last night I ran an activity table at Family Math and Literacy Night at one of the schools where I work. I set up my go-to project -- collage making with tissue paper (it never looks bad, but simultaneously, no one is ever really all that good at it) -- and sat down at my station with a New Yorker. I didn't really think anyone was going to come to my station. Most of the kids who go to this school don't know who I am, and "art station" sounds like it has about as much to do with math and literacy as "whale station" or "popcorn station" might. (Although, I would absolutely go to a "whale station" if such a station existed.)

Saint Joseph's Day Sketch Book

My good friend Jordan told me that I had to watch the Mardi Gras Indians on Saint Joseph's Day this year, since he was out of town and would have to miss it. I confessed to him that in six years, I'd never been out for Saint Joseph's. He was aghast.

Love Letters

So lately I've been doing this really embarrassing, Oprah Magazine-y, you-go-girl type of thing. I've been writing love letters to myself. I don't mean that as a metaphor. I don't go out and get a latte, feel guilty, and then say to myself, "You totally deserve this, beautiful," (to the weird looks of other coffee-going customers). I literally and legitimately have been writing long, syrupy, sometimes kind of sexy love letters. Then I put them in envelopes, address them to myself, and put them in the mail with my own address on the envelope and a stamp. Yes, I know how much a stamp costs. And yes, I know that I live close enough to myself that I could easily walk to my house to drop off the letter in person. But there's just something about getting a letter in the mail -- especially an emphatic, doting, periodically salacious one -- that is particularly exciting.

Multitasking

My longest and most genuinely functional-seeming romantic relationship was with a comic book writer I had written a glorified fan letter to. He was much younger than me, so I think he saw my infatuation with him as sort of exotic. I had all these things he didn’t yet have: a job, a cat, groceries from the grocery store that I bought with my own money, shampoo, etc. I had been a shitty girlfriend to enough people to know how to not be one anymore, and I think that was also an attractive quality I possessed. The thing that attracted me to him, of course, was that he was my favorite comic book artist.

Magnets With Phrases On Them

I am unfortunately inclined towards the kinds of sayings that are made into magnets. Do I have "Keep Calm and Carry On" coaster? Yes. I hate this about myself, but yes. Do I secretly write down bumper sticker phrases -- like "Life doesn't put things in front of you you are unable to handle," or "In the end we only regret the chances we did not take" -- in a tangerine colored notebook titled "Things To Keep In Mind?" Guilty. If I was at someone's house and noticed they had tons of encouraging quote paraphernalia (especially, but not limited to, encouraging quotes made into vinyl stickers in Papyrus to be stuck on walls), I would dismiss that person entirely and never respond to their text messages. And yet, I am one of them.

Therapist

I made an appointment with a therapist. I'm telling you this precisely because I don't want to; because the whole idea completely mortifies me; because writing "I made an appointment with a therapist" reads to me like, "Well, I'm officially a complete failure. Soon I will live in a garbage can."

If You Have Come To Help

I heard on "This American Life" that you're never supposed to talk about y our dreams because no one is interested in them. The exception, of course, is when you have a dream about the person you are talking to. We all like to be stars in other peoples' subconsciouses.