This holiday season, I’ve carried a particular song with me more than in other years. The first time I heard “Now Behold the Lamb,” I was a fourteen year-old, recently baptized praise dancer trying to learn my first routine. There were maybe eight to ten of us girls who danced together – a few of…
Category: Something True
Morning Has Broken
Several years after being baptized at the age of 14, I prayerfully chose a small Christian college to pursue my degree. There, I began to struggle with my faith. Try as I might, I couldn’t unquestioningly accept my college culture’s indoctrination. I couldn’t successfully initiate conversation or debate when I encountered a doctrinal point in…
Where I’m from
I came across this NPR poetry project recently and decided to undertake it with my students when the time came to write poetry. NPR’s collaborative poem effort was inspired by this gem by George Ella Lyon, after which I modeled my own version in order to demonstrate for my students what they’d be doing. I…
Slow Fade
August 2015, I was teaching 8th grade English for the first time at a small private school. I had spent hours all summer poring over the books I had scavenged from the room where the same class was taught the year before. The prior May, I had taken home several teacher editions of books to…
Get out
Have you ever cried to try and get out of something? The tears may have been real, but they also may have been amped up for dramatic effect, all in the hopes that someone will want so badly to stop your tears that they’ll do what you want? I tried that once. To get out…
Legacy
Near the end of the last act of “Hamilton,” our hero pauses just before he’s shot dead by Aaron Burr. This long pause gives Hamilton time to muse on his legacy – what the word means, what his will be – and to say goodbye to his wife and hello to his mother and son….