I woke up in the middle of the night last night in a panic. I wasn’t sure I remembered my social security number, Rosellen’s as well. Where would I be able to find documents that contained the numbers? Were they on the 1099 forms that came last week from the IRS? First thing in the morning I would have to write them down and put them in a prominent place so that whoever drew the short lot on...

 I may have mentioned in a long-ago entry that one of my favorite writing prompts in my workshops with teachers and other adult groups asked people to write about the history of their hair. This is a topic that most women are immediately drawn to. Men less so, unless they have dealt with baldness, served in the military or have been caught up in the dynamic world of Black hair styling.I...

Over the course of the 4+ years of cranking out these blog posts, I’ve mentioned our friend Sy Montgomery more than once. We visit her and her equally amazing husband Howard Mansfield at their place in Hancock, New Hampshire every summer on our returns to our home away from home. Those visits and Sy’s postings on Facebook always reveal new excursions into the world of living things by this...

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been retired for more than ten years. The first six years didn’t feel like retirement because I almost immediately constructed a schedule that, intentionally, represented an act of denial. At least three days each week, I was in classrooms, most of which belonged to graduates of UTEP, the teacher education program I helped found. In addition, I fulfilled a long...

In the early years of The North Kenwood Oakland Charter School (NKO) we didn’t have any graduating class yet. We had started our upper grade enrollment with fifth grade, so it wasn’t going to be until Year 4 that we could end the year with a graduation ceremony. So, in the interim, my wonderful teaching partner Lou Bradley and I created a Rites of Passage ritual which students could participate...