Category: parenting
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To number our days
My father recounts a sunny afternoon in grade school when he returned home breathless and tearful: a traveling, weeklong science fair had just begun at school. When my grandmother Sharon asked him what was wrong, he lamented that he couldn’t possibly attend all the workshops—there simply wouldn’t be enough time. He would have to make…
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When the world is hushed
Sometime during the summer of 2020, the girls and I were enjoying a juicy meta-conversation about our creatureliness (how we are like animals) after reading a few chapters of Gary Paulsen’s The Hatchet. I had been trying to develop a readaloud habit that I like for years, but it had felt like torture. I, the…
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Truth “balm”
The first time I stepped away from full-time work as a public school teacher and began to learn about other ways of schooling, it was messy. I “flipped my lid” in anger often, and was full of shame about it afterwards. On one of the worst days in memory, I actually said aloud that the…
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Mourning: worth the work
Recently, our daughter Lorraine fell in love: with Middle English. “Where can I learn more of this? It’s amazing!” she exclaimed, after reading along with a recording of Genesis 1: “1 In the bigynnyng God made of nouyt heuene and erthe. 2 Forsothe the erthe was idel and voide, and derknessis weren on the face…