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”
Author Archives: michaeljarmer
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. . .”
Mindfulness in 2018: A Reflection
My meditation stats were stunning in 2018, comparatively, that is. Here’s the snapshot: one hundred and seventy-one consecutive days on the cushion as compared to one hundred and twenty four days the previous year. That’s an improvement of almost an entire two month’s worth of meditation on a cushion. However, I must confess that myContinue reading “Mindfulness in 2018: A Reflection”
#317: On Not Being Able to Remember a Student’s Name
She sat right in front of me, in the first row, as it were, and I called her by name, the wrong name. She looked at me. She said, “Who?” And I thought, and maybe I said out loud, “Oh my god.” And even while I knew it was the wrong name, for the lifeContinue reading “#317: On Not Being Able to Remember a Student’s Name”
Stuff, Stuff, Stuff; the Excavation and Removal (?) of Stuff; Holding On To or Letting Go of the Record of Me
A burst pipe (circa 1930) in the basement necessitates the removal of 40 some years of accumulated stuff buried in a storage closet we fondly refer to as “the scary room.” There’s a bunch of shit in there, we know, that needs to go, stuff that’s doing no one any good. Now that we’ve hadContinue reading “Stuff, Stuff, Stuff; the Excavation and Removal (?) of Stuff; Holding On To or Letting Go of the Record of Me”
michael jarmer 