Strange Little Collecting Project

To the man that followed me all the way to my car today: Did you know that women don’t feel flattered when strange men follow a few feet behind them telling us how nice our butts look when we walk? Did you know that instead of feeling flattered we usually feel terrified and threatened? Many of us are actually berating ourselves for not being “overly-cautious” and for not purchasing mace, pepper-spray, or a taser. We are getting mad at ourselves for having the “it will never happen to me mentality.” We don’t hear “Hey sweetheart. Where are you going?” as a question. We hear it as a threat. Our hearts aren’t fluttering because your words are welcome and exhilarating. It’s the adrenaline because we know that you are twice our size and could physically overpower us if you chose to. We aren’t looking at the ground because we’re being coy, humble, or playing hard-to-get. We’re afraid to make eye-contact in case you take that as an invitation or an agreement. Did you know that I’m we

It’s fortunate for every student in North Carolina that their public school teachers don’t treat them the way that the state and local governments are currently treating public educators. If I treated my students the way North Carolina public schools treated me, my classroom would look like this: I would set my students up for failure. Every school day, teachers across the state are set up for failure by being placed in overcrowded classrooms without the proper materials. I taught classes of 32 even though I only had a class set of 30 books. I had one set of books for three separate classes which meant I could not assign any independent reading practice for homework because I needed the books for my other two classes. If I treated my students the way that the state treated me, I would give them a completely unreasonable assignment. I would ask my sophomores to independently read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English and then demand a comparative analysis essay discussing g

I’ve avoided writing this for a while because I did not want to offend any of my colleagues that are still in the North Carolina education trenches. So all of my NC teacher-friends, please know that I am on your side. But after spending a year teaching outside of North Carolina’s public schools, I think I finally have enough perspective to try and discuss my frustration and troubled relationship with my home state’s public education system. North Carolina public school teachers are not treated like professionals. If I had to explain the biggest difference between my old job and my new job, I could explain it succinctly with that sentence. In North Carolina, I was not treated like a professional. I was not treated like someone who had a degree and a career status license in my subject matter. Teachers are treated more like whining indentured servants (the younger teachers more literally since they are paying back their student loans) and are then told to be thankful that they e

  I recently read and taught A Tale of Two Cities for the first time. My only knowledge of the book before I started reading it was the infamous opening sentence: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” (Of course that is the 3.14 version of that opening sentence that goes on to make at least 6 more paradoxical comparisons). With my limited knowledge of the book, I was not expecting it to be as bloody and barbaric as it is. (Which is stupid because it’s about the French Revolution, aptly referred to as the “bloody revolution”). There were actually some sections of the book where I found myself feeling queasy at Dickens’ descriptions of the punishments and executions that were carried out. And having to explain to a room full of 14-15-year-old girls (whose school mascot is the teddy bear) what it means to disembowel and quarter someone is not exactly enjoyable. What struck me the most about the violence in the book was the barbaric perpetrators of these punishme