The Polliwog Journal

The bell was about to ring, and my eyes were on my computer screen, getting ready to take attendance. When I looked up, there was Jake, fully six feel tall now, in new desert fatigues, his Army uniform.
I didn’t hear him come in. He was suddenly just there, smiling. My freshmen looked at this [...]

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One of my AP students is also my yearbook editor and there are times we need to communicate, so we have each other’s cell phone numbers. Today, he and three of his classmates missed our class for a genetics conference, so I had set them up with the assignment: read Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning [...]

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If you read The Polliwog Journal, you know I am a huge fan of blogs in the classroom, but especially for teachers as a means to reflect, share, and communicate with the broader teaching community. Not only that, but teachers who blog are more likely to engage their students in the interactive realm that blogs [...]

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I got the nicest compliment today. One of my AP students said, “I don’t think of you as a teacher. I just think of you as an adult who knows things.”
I am not sure why her comment means so much to me. After all, over 45 years ago, when I was barely in school myself, [...]

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