michaeljarmer

#87: Morning Meditation with Nerf Gun

While the boy loads his weapon and hides, Dad walks slowly around the yard, breathing. He knows the ambush is coming, but tries for and momentarily achieves a quiet mind. Even while he’s absorbing the cool morning air of a sunny spring day and loving the trees as they await their first blooms of theContinue reading “#87: Morning Meditation with Nerf Gun”

#86: Another Stupid Human Facebook Trick

So, how many times have you replied to a Facebook post simply begging for your special brand of snark and sarcasm and humor and then changed your mind at the last minute and deleted the whole thing before you could post your reply? You think, no, they won’t get it, or, yes, they will getContinue reading “#86: Another Stupid Human Facebook Trick”

#85: The Eight Year Old Son of the American English Teacher Illustrates the Chinese Poets

It’s a teacher work-day and Mom is getting an MRI, so the boy comes with Dad to school, takes copious notes during the staff meeting and afterwards creates a mural in the classroom. He begins with the tree. When you come back from Spring Break, he says, you can do a lesson about trees. ConsiderContinue reading “#85: The Eight Year Old Son of the American English Teacher Illustrates the Chinese Poets”

#84: The Breast Cancer Poem

We pulled the mammogram call-back letter out of the mailbox on Christmas day. The rest is a blur of fearful unknowing– until the biopsy, and then waiting for the results of the biopsy, and then getting acquainted with the strangeness of saying, yes, I have cancer, or, yes, my wife has cancer. Early detection, a tinyContinue reading “#84: The Breast Cancer Poem”

#83: The American High School English Teacher Tries To Do Second Grade Math

Show your work, the instructions say, in tens and ones. Okay. Fair enough. What’s the problem? 35 – 18 = ____ When I was a kid learning to do the math, we were taught to borrow from the tens column which made a problem like this easier to do; it made one hard problem with twoContinue reading “#83: The American High School English Teacher Tries To Do Second Grade Math”

#82: The Eight Year Old Gives His Father the American English Teacher a Writing Lesson

The eight year old says, what did you do at work today? And his Dad tells him about the fishbowl discussion around the novel he’s teaching. And the boy says, during writing time at school we make hamburgers. He explains: Writing is like a hamburger. It has to start and end with the same thing,Continue reading “#82: The Eight Year Old Gives His Father the American English Teacher a Writing Lesson”

#81: The American English Teacher Addresses His Students About the Failed Lesson on Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle”

He announces a quiz over the Washington Irving story his students were supposed to have read in class on the previous day. The quiz is designed to efficiently assess what, if anything, they understood from their reading, dumb kinds of literal comprehension prompts, the type of which he rarely, if ever, gives: Explain why RipContinue reading “#81: The American English Teacher Addresses His Students About the Failed Lesson on Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle””

#80: Shaping the Pixels (Another Minecraft Poem)

There seems to be an inexhaustible amount of stuff that can be known about this game. Dad writes a poem to articulate his emerging understanding of his eight year old son’s favorite past time, and realizes in short order that he’s only scratched the surface, that he’s only scratched the surface of the surface, thatContinue reading “#80: Shaping the Pixels (Another Minecraft Poem)”

#79: A Minecraft Poem (Dad’s Understanding Emerges)

As I understand it, Minecraft is a computer game in which a first person player named Steve wanders through a seemingly endless outdoor landscape made entirely of blocks of things. The grass, the trees, the water, the hills, the clouds in the sky–all blocks (nothing in this world is curved, arched, or angular-slanty). In his wandering,Continue reading “#79: A Minecraft Poem (Dad’s Understanding Emerges)”

#78: The American English Teacher Wonders About the Effectiveness of Reading To His Students

My students love it when I read out loud to them. Well, that might be putting it on a bit thick. Let’s say instead that they prefer that to reading independently. I read out loud well and this guarantees at the end at least some level of certainty that every kid in the room hasContinue reading “#78: The American English Teacher Wonders About the Effectiveness of Reading To His Students”