Two days ago, I turned fifty. Last week, I started my celebrations when my whole family was in town. My sister drove in from Brooklyn. My mother flew in from Chicago. My aunt and uncle came up from Scarsdale. (Unfortunately, my father and stepmother and in-laws couldn’t come.) With about forty people, I enjoyed a…
“Why”…Wednesdays
31. Why I Ask Experts
I don’t know everything. When some people in my English department have questions about grammar, they come to me because I know a lot of the rules. I’ve learned them, over the years, as the person in charge of keeping our Conventions of Composition website up to date. Even so, some sentences leave me stumped….
30. Why I Loved My Internship
Being an intern wasn’t what I thought it would be. But when you think about it, how can we ever guess in advance about what we’ll learn and how we’ll grow? For my internship with Metamorphosis, I got to do several different projects, all of which helped me learn either about establishing and maintaining an…
29. Why I Love Teaching Different Age Groups
I’ve been teaching high-school aged kids for over twenty years, but this summer, a friend asked me to teach a class at the local retirement community. My first reaction was fear. What would happen, I wondered, if my students asked me questions I couldn’t answer? What if they knew more about the history of the…
28. Why I Love Grammar
…and YOU SHOULD LOVE GRAMMAR, TOO! I can’t believe how many people have the totally wrong idea that grammar is dull. Clearly, they’ve been looking at language backwards. S-D-R-A-W-K-C-A-B! Turn that thinking around. If you want to share an idea, you need to give it in a way that the other person can understand. That’s…
27. Why I Volunteered to Dance in Public
By the time you read this, my moment in the spotlight will have come and gone. Thank goodness. I’m not a terrific dancer. Let me backup to tell you how I ended up on stage in front of almost everyone at my school. Two Senior girls completed an independent study in choreography. All spring, they…
26. Why I Notice Details
“Dear Guy Who Just Made My Burrito” photo from Medium.com, but found through SmittenKitchen.com I found the photo above from clicking a link on SmittenKitchen.com (breakfast slab pie — YUM!) that landed me on Medium.com. The blog post, “Dear Guy Who Just Made My Burrito,” opened up a world of thought for me about my…
25. Why I Love Being a Mentor
I recently got back from a twenty-four-hour trip to Philadelphia to work with my teaching fellow, a teacher at Hotchkiss and a graduate student in University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Education program. For her work, she teaches some Hotchkiss classes, takes courses (both online and in person at various points in the year), and works…
24. Why I Love Reunion
When we first got to Hotchkiss, an older teacher warned us to “Get out of dodge (Dodge?) during reunion weekend.” That teacher let us know that the five and ten-year classes often behaved in ridiculous ways, the dorm would be loud all night, and mayhem would ensue. Why would we stick around, we wondered, since…
23. Why I Love GOOD Pranks
I know the adage, “It’s not fun unless it’s fun for everybody,” and completely agree. If a person does something mean and calls it a prank, really she/he’s just lying about being a bully. I’m not for that. But the other morning, when a bouncy house appeared in the middle of our school’s Dining Hall,…