I took a nontraditional route to teaching. I’m sure you’re not surprised. After a decade as a cubicle dweller, two untimely layoffs within a year were enough to make me finally take the step I had been contemplating for a long time. With little advance preparation, I took the Massachusetts teaching licensure exam, which, when…
Massachusetts
What’s Mike Mulligan Got to Do With It?
In the small town where I grew up in central Connecticut, in the era of avocado-colored kitchen appliances and a national reliance on wide collars and polyester fabrics, there were five elementary schools. One of these had already closed by the time I reached kindergarten and one was brand new. My hometown has grown over…
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…
Making Real-World Connections
My students sometimes accused me of torture. If you know me, you know how funny that is. Maybe I did torture my students, but it was justifiable in the war on classroom boredom. It served the greater good of learning! More than a few times, I have mentioned Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire”…