Welcome to A Teacher’s Essays!

This blog, A Teacher’s Essays, is nearly two decades late. I will often tell my students who are chronically tardy, “At least you made it,” so it seems apropos to me to welcome such sage advice.

Truth is, I’ve been collecting observations surrounding the world of education long before my teaching credential was signed, at the time, by California’s Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Instead of storing unbelievable, humorous, frustrating, or what some may perceive as mundane memories amongst the pages of old notebooks and deep recesses in my mind, I’m excited to dust them off and digitize them here.

Although I posses an uncanny ability to pick a teacher out of a crowd of people—as if we’re all cut from a similar cloth—each perspective is a unique snowflake. Every teacher transforms from a noun into a very active verb using maneuvers specific to their particular personality, training, and comfort with the craft. I may share essays about instructional practices I have valued—or discarded—over the years, but my intent will never be to present myself as a master of education’s vast, bureaucratic, and tumultuous domain. 

I treasure my teaching career—and most of my essays may feel like a trip over the rainbow because that’s what the good days can feel like—but some days the profession can also resemble an agonizing walk through hell. Life, work, relationships, and anything else worth having can’t only be Yin; Yang will always seeps into the fold.

The writings that will be featured at A Teacher’s Essays will cover terrain you’d expect a teacher to traverse: kids, parents, principals, co-workers, standards, and other topics you likely remember from your own childhood; additionally, I will also share my eyewitness vantage from the frontlines of the classroom, a place that, otherwise, remains invisible to outsiders interested in a peek.

Unfortunately, the ear-piercing bells that inform each move throughout a school day’s maze aren’t available online, but if you click the “follow” button in the sidebar and subscribe to A Teacher’s Essays, you can receive an email notification (ding!) of a newly minted essay having been delivered into the ethos of cyberspace.