I’ve been injured recently, and off my running. I tell that story (sort of) over at my other, less serious blog (it’s coauthored with my dog, so yeah, a lot less serious). I’ve been very slack in keeping up with my writing, and am working really hard to stay consistent with both my running and my writing. This was posted originally over there. I wanted to talk this time, though, about what gets me out the door (even though it’s…
Not long ago, my stepdaughter called us and left a few concerning messages via voicemail and text. I knew, immediately, what was up. Suddenly, many of the bloggers I follow are pregnant, too (ok, maybe not so “suddenly” in the cases of some – if not pregnant, then newly delivered). Suddenly, I’m thinking about small children again – I’m used to thinking about young people in terms of my students (who are definitely NOT children, although they might act like…
The semester can’t end, it would seem, without a student crying in my classroom (I don’t have an office, really, so this is as likely to happen in the hallway, in front of the Coke machines, or on the way to the parking lot, tbh). I always feel badly when students are upset by the work we are doing, but I’m also heartened – it means that they actually care about what they are writing, and how they’re writing it….
So we just passed the one year anniversary of the Women’s March – I went with my sister last year, and we had quite a great time. Things were rough, though. I couldn’t imagine how in the world we had gotten to this place, where it was considered a great idea to elect someone to the highest office in the land who had no previous experience in government. I was devastated at the loss of our first not-male president –…
Well, I have to say I’m rather torn about the plethora of information I have to make use of as I plan for class. I recently assigned students an investigative report, as part of a larger group of assignments that span the semester (a reflective piece on the topic they chose, with a number of initial sources, followed by an Annotated Bibliography, then the report, and now the argumentative paper). The report helps hammer home the need for careful, thoughtful,…
So I finished up that 12 week training program at Fleet Feet in Huntersville – it was awesome, excellent, and most helpful. I really enjoyed the structure of it, and the knowledge that there were people expecting me to show up was a real motivator (although I do have to cop to at least two days of failure to appear due to various health related ailments). Last night was our last run together before our Saturday “goal race.” My goal…
I’m floored by how affected I am by listening to the newest installment of podcast brilliance (“S-Town“) by the folks who did “Serial.” I listened to “Serial” as I drove to and from a less than exciting semester of classes – I spent a lot of time driving that semester, I was somewhat unhappy about various things (not just work), and so I spent a lot of time attempting to soothe myself through the use of enormous amounts of junk food….
I’ve never really run with a group. I have a vague memory of attempting to be part of the cross country team while in middle school and epically failing at it, and as I’ve aged, I haven’t done any better at developing a community around me. I saw an advertisement at a specialty running shop for training groups and dismissed it out of hand. First of all, I can do this all alone, thank you very much. I don’t need…
The first time I gave more than a passing thought to what was actually behind the plastic wrap and on the Styrofoam trays in the meat section of the grocery store, I was a thirty-something mother, recently returned to college to complete my bachelor’s degree. I had lucked out and gotten into a history class with the best professor I had ever encountered, and his classes consisted of him strolling in, jotting some notes on the board, and then talking…
So part of my summer vacation was intended to be work on how I can best recharge my batteries during the semester. I do a very, very bad job of self-care, I think, and am in a constant state of forgetting that if I do not do at least the bare minimum of self-care daily, I am in actuality doing a detriment to not just me but my students. I have to remember the old “put the oxygen on yourself…