Can you find a common thread linking bikinis, mac and cheese, UFOs, fried chicken, jello, and ice cream? You can add in hot fudge sundaes, emojis, hammocks, hot dogs, kissing, and picnics. Wait, there’s more! Avocados, cheesecake, lipstick, and drum roll—Harry Potter’s birthday! Yeppers, each one is celebrated during the month of July. Some for…
Since today is the first official day of summer, let’s talk summer bucket lists! Every teacher I know has a list of things he or she hopes to accomplish during the summer. I have one. You have one. My list isn’t written down anywhere; it just rocks and rolls in my head. Colleagues of mine…
Well, it’s that season. You know the one. The season when most people get eaten by bugs. Mosquitoes, ticks, and chiggers think I am delicious! I can barely step outside without a good coating of bug spray. But when I take a break from the swatting and scratching, I have to admit that I have…
At the beginning of the summer, I bought myself an eReader. It’s a popular one from an online retail powerhouse. And it’s okay. My reasons for buying it were simple: portability and an end to space- and paper-consuming physical books. This device was going to revolutionize my reading habits (which had suffered the last few…
It is my belief that every day you have students in your classroom is a day to educate. That includes the very last days of school. As much as I yearned for the opportunity to slack off a little, maybe show a film adaptation of a novel we had read, I rarely gave my students…
As long as we’re talking about summer—and who isn’t?—let’s talk about your plans for professional development. When I was a teacher active in the classroom, I was privileged to be living and working close to Boston, Massachusetts. For those of you who don’t know, there are about 714 colleges and universities in Boston (or so…
Is it just me, or did someone set the 2012 calendar to “Stun”? Really? It’s the middle of the second week of May already? Where did this come from? I’m stunned. If you’re feeling the same way, then I think it’s a good idea if I get a few items of looming summer business out…
How did I get ready to head back into my classroom as the new school year loomed? By tackling the pile of papers and artifacts left over from the day I brought everything home in June, of course. I was a pro teacher, after all. It was never a huge pile, and nothing had been…
At 9 am, a train leaves a seaside resort, heading inland, at 50 miles per hour. Seven hundred miles away, at 9:45 am, in the mountains near a wide blue lake, another train leaves an alpine resort, headed toward the ocean, at 45 miles per hour. The first train makes three stops, each lasting ten…
We wear many faces, don many hats, and invoke many influences throughout the course of a single day. As individuals, we are like that. And as a company, The Mailbox is like that. See, here at The Mailbox, we’re already talking about back-to-school even as we know most of you are wrapping up last school…