For me, the answer is always 42, unless the question is “How many times per month do you buy school supplies with your own money?” In that case, my answer would have had to be “between three and six.” What would your answer be? Submit a comment with your answer to my previous blog post…
Home Economics
Are the Cupboards Bare? Teacher Appreciation Week Giveaway
By early May, with the end of the school year on the horizon and Field Day looming, a supply cabinet filled mostly with air and dust bunnies always stared back at me. The tissue reserves had been decimated by March, if not earlier. Notebook paper? Fugeddaboutit! Cleaning products? Sure, there were a few items left,…
Celebrating the School Cafeteria on National Spaghetti Day
We all have our little traumas in life. For example, I grew up as a brown-bag kid. The first time I forgot my lunch? It was a day that became a painful memory etched deep in my soul. It was a Friday. The pizza wasn’t so much bad per se, as it was simply not…
A Different Kind of School Supply
Last week I touched upon my anxiety at the beginning of the school year about never having the right amount of the necessary supplies for my classroom—specifically: tissues, which seem to disappear in January faster than raindrops in the Mojave in August. But have you ever found yourself buying a jacket for a student to…
Classroom Supply Anxiety
The scene: Mr. Savelle’s classroom, midwinter. Outside, the world is frigid and white. Germs, bacteria, and insouciant upper-respiratory infections stalk the land. Inside, we are bathed in hand sanitizer and going through tissues like Rachael Ray goes through extra virgin olive oil. Not familiar with Rachael Ray and her zest for olive oil? Then let’s…
The Tipping Point
At some point in a teacher’s summer, one’s thoughts turn to the coming school year. Instead of hitting the snooze button 47 times in a row, you hit it 32 times one day, then 18 times soon after, until you’re finally down to just twice. You find yourself glancing longingly at your local teacher store…
Light Dawns on Marblehead
In college in the previous millennium, I had the pleasure of becoming good friends with a fellow New Englander out of Concord, Massachusetts. These days he’s a physical education teacher in Pennsylvania, but back then we were simply undergrads who liked robust, raucous, and challenging dialogue. We were once engrossed in a conversation with some…
How Green Is Your Classroom?
There is a saying in the world of graphic design and, specifically, page design that says, “the eye likes white space.” A reader shouldn’t have to struggle and strain to pick a sentence or a paragraph out of a jumble of competing images and words. That’s a tough maxim to balance against the importance of…
This Is a Post About Food Allergies
Let us return once more to the time of burnt-orange and avocado-colored kitchen appliances. It was a time when you considered a friend extremely lucky if he got more than three channels on his family television—a 27-inch screen (with something called a picture tube) embedded in a piece of furniture the size of a small…
I Wash My Hands of Responsibility
By now you’ve no doubt received all of your National Hand Washing Awareness Week greeting cards from friends, relatives, and secret admirers. It happens this time every year, our mailboxes stuffed with sincere or humorous cards reminding us to wash our hands to fight off the never-ending assault of germs and bacteria. There’s always that…