Learning to Live

Last August I opened up to social media about something that I had been dealing with for a long time. It has been a little over a year since I came to the realization that I needed to make a decision to get help and within that year I realized the true power of our decisions. For a long time I was terrified of making decisions because I was always scared that I would make the wrong one, but as I have gotten older, I realized that the truth lies at the heart of every decisions. That truth is the life that we want for ourselves. This year I was fortunate enough to travel to a lot of beautiful places with some of my favorite people. That is mostly because at the beginning of 2018 I made a list of places I would go and I made it happen. Simply making the decision to live the life that you want is all it takes to get that life. People will often comment on my fun and adventurous life and forget the work that it takes to get there. We tend to believe that the grass is always greener ...

Hi everyone! I promise I'll be back with something soon... Just reminding myself how to write! Thanks as always to Brian Andreas for capturing my feelings about EVERYTHING.  http://www.storypeople.com/2013/12/16/how-to-write/

As a teacher it hasn't been particularly easy to listen to the media in the weeks following the Florida shooting. I didn't know how to react to everything that was spinning around on Facebook and I definitely didn't know how to talk about it with my students. I still don't know how to talk about it with them, but I have found it encouraging to listen to how they talk about it among each other. We have been working on an argumentative unit and although some people would definitely disagree with me, I do not believe in censoring my students. Instead, I believe that they should have the freedom to research and write about whatever they want. This unit started right around the shooting and naturally I had a few students who had a lot of feelings on the recent shooting and what the government was doing about it. My favorite example of this was when a student started doing a lot of research on gun control. I did my best to play the devil's advocate and challenge the p...