michaeljarmer

#319: How to Write a Poem Every Day

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends called National Poetry Writing Month, or NaPoWriMo for short. Here is my first of 30 attempts, my seventh year in a row. The number 319 in my title, FYI, represents the number of poems I have published on the mighty blog, 180 of which wereContinue reading “#319: How to Write a Poem Every Day”

A Single Dispatch After the AWP Conference

Oh my god, after three days of the kind of intensity that only a conference of thousands of creative writers under one roof could generate, I am spent. And yet, at 4:30 on Saturday, as I walk away from the Oregon Convention Center at the end of my last session at the Association for WritersContinue reading “A Single Dispatch After the AWP Conference”

Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: Time On Our Side?

Synchronicity, as Jung described it, is a meaningful coincidence, an “acausal connecting principal.” Things happen back to back that seem to be meaningfully related; even though the first thing could not be said to have caused the second thing, we still feel the buzz or the chill of revelation, usually in a thrilling and positiveContinue reading “Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: Time On Our Side?”

Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: Teacher Appreciation and Spring Break Randomness

First of all, here’s a thing a student of mine wrote in response to the question: what does e. e. cummings say in his poetry about being and unbeing? When e.e cummings talks about being and unbeing the message that he’s pretraying [sic] is that to be [is] not to be and not to beContinue reading “Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: Teacher Appreciation and Spring Break Randomness”

Educational Music Shopping: Why Did These Artists Win Grammys?

Okay, I know exactly why the Laurie Anderson/Kronos Quartet record won a Grammy: because it is awesome. But I wondered about the other winners, the ones that, of course, I had heard of (you’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard of them), but had never listened to. So, at MusicContinue reading “Educational Music Shopping: Why Did These Artists Win Grammys?”

Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: Kids These Days, Part the Third–On Being and Unbeing

I’ve been writing lately about student behavior. In one blog I commiserated with my elementary school colleagues about young children who cause violent disruptions and I bemoaned the high school apathy I saw at my own school, and in another blog I wrote about surprising teenage shenanigans, you know, like bringing communion wafers to class.Continue reading “Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: Kids These Days, Part the Third–On Being and Unbeing”

Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: Kids These Days, Part Deux

Apparently, for $16.36, you can buy a tub of communion wafers from Amazon. And I know this because a student of mine came to class the other day with a tub of communion wafers. He was passing them out. Snacks for his classmates. At first, I was just sort of dumbfounded. It was a brandContinue reading “Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: Kids These Days, Part Deux”

#318: Ode to Boredom and Non-Snow

It’s 5:30 in the evening, my son is playing video games and my wife is napping and I’ve poured myself a brandy after hemming and hawing almost all day long about what to do with myself. I did four productive things: I picked up a ball of cotton stuffing from an eviscerated dog toy; earlier,Continue reading “#318: Ode to Boredom and Non-Snow”

Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: Kids These Days

In my neck of the woods (Portland, Oregon) there has been some media attention paid recently to a terrible new development inside elementary school classrooms: violently disruptive children. The problem is exacerbated by an interpretation of State Law that says that a teacher can never touch a student unless that student is in imminent danger.Continue reading “Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: Kids These Days”

Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: We Should Be Angry Most of the Time, But for Some Reason. . .

There are things that should infuriate public school teachers about our jobs. Here’s just one: It is an impossible gig; to wit, there is not enough time in the work day to do the job we have been asked to do, or rather, the job that we would like to do, the job that weContinue reading “Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: We Should Be Angry Most of the Time, But for Some Reason. . .”