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Yes, Harold and the Purple Crayon.  It may be beloved to some, but it has freaked me out since I was very young.  To this day when I read it I am filled with existential dread. Harold is the only “real” person in a world of nothingness.  Everything around him is an endless white void, and nothing exists unless he creates it with ...

The worst is behind me.  I’m pretty sure about that. This week is a short week, to fit in parent conferences.  That always helps. I will finally have an assistant teacher — hooray!  She starts Tuesday, and I can’t wait.  She was so awesome in the interview the Prince kept sending me these looks saying, “let’s hire ...

I'm re-reading Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski. The main premise is that the media takes a retarded gardner and makes him into a potential presidential candidate. He becomes an icon, a product of a culture of amusement. In many respects, it seems loosely based upon The Idiot. However, it can also read as a commentary on our own shallow ...

Anyone reading this who is already a teacher (I know I have some fledgling teachers reading this blog, as well as some non-teachers) knows what teaching is like.  Teachers are well-acquainted with the experiences of being bombarded by stimuli all day, of needing to think of 100 things at a time, and having to make decisions constantly.  So ...

Alas, it was another difficult morning. Most of the hour I had before school started I was at a tech meeting in the computer lab, where we learned how to do a behavior screener on each child.  I got all mine done — which was good — but only with lots of technical glitches, which was not so good.  Everyone on the staff is ...

Hooray for Mo Willems.  I decided that September would be Mo Willems month in my classroom.  Usually I have this “welcome to school” theme and I read all these books about school, but this summer I admitted to myself that I think all those books are boring, so I went straight to a unit on bugs and an author study on Mr. Willems, my ...

Actually, things went okay today, on this, our eighth day of school. On Friday I passed out the Friday folders to the children as I was lining them up to go out in the hall to get their jackets for recess.  They started opening their folders, dropping their papers on the floor, and chatting with each other, and I had a really hard time getting ...

Here’s the list, and I have to admit, I haven’t read any of them: The shortlist for children aged six and under: Stick Man by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Axel Scheffler Elephant Wellyphant by Nick Sharratt The Great Paper Caper by Oliver Jeffers The Witch’s Children Go to School by Ursula Jones, illustrated by Russell ...