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My Love-Hate Relationship with Teaching

I have a confession to make, one that seemingly meets the criteria of a mundane mid-life crisis: I love what I do, but I hate my job. I’m a kindergarten teacher by trade. I adore children—always have, always will—and have a natural affinity for the littlest learners. I enjoy watching their growth across a school year, the way they come in green and fresh as newly planted seeds at the start, and leave my classroom as saplings stretching toward the infinite sky of knowledge and understanding. I hate the metrics that are used to define my students’ performance (and my own). I loathe the over-reliance on a narrow band of assessment measures that ignores the intangibles of student growth and extinguishes the joy of learning. I resent seeing children reduced to numbers on a grid in the name of data-based decision-making. I cherish the time I spend with my students in the Zone of Proximal Development. I thrive on the everyday teachable moments that enable me to coach into my stud...
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The Real Housewives of BC

My name is Laura and I watch the Real Housewives more regularly than I'd like to admit. I’m a vicarious visitor to Orange County and New York, used to spend a lot of time in New Jersey, and occasionally duck into Atlanta and Beverly Hills, just to see what’s going on. It is a bit of an addiction, the Housewives series. I was a latecomer to its explosively entertaining parties. I’d never been big on binge watching television and, honestly, it wasn’t until I began treatment for a breast cancer recurrence that I had the capacity and desire to collapse onto the couch and seek mindless diversion. It didn’t take me long to find the Bravo network, and it was almost impossible not to develop an affinity for their alternate version of female reality. Perpetual reruns of previous episodes got me quickly up to speed on the characters and their almost comically surreal and wacky hi-jinks. I also didn’t have the energy to find the remote and change the channel. For those who aren...
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Pennies from Heaven

“Pennies from heaven” is a phenomenon oft-referenced by advice columnists in their discussions of grief. It is not uncommon for the bereaved to find pennies that seem to have been sent from their deceased loved ones. I never gave much thought to the origins of the coins I found at my feet. I’d occasionally come across a penny—find a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck!—but I never considered that they could have come from anywhere more remote than someone’s faulty pocket. That changed after Anna’s death. A few weeks after her funeral, I found a dime on the garage floor. I found another one in a parking lot…and then another one in my bedroom. Dimes were popping up all over the place, seemingly out of nowhere. At first, I figured it was random, just a weird coincidence that I was pocketing ten cents on such a regular basis. It took me a while to connect the dots between the specific denomination of the coin and Anna’s birth date, October 10. Might it be som...
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