The Usual Chaos

Mrs. Friend, why did you become a teacher? Mrs. Friend, why do you coach Academic Decathlon? Mrs. Friend, are you proud of us? These questions filled my weekend as I chauffeured and cheered, coached and collected nine teen Academic Decathletes. At Lone Star High School in Frisco, we gathered them to prepare for battle. They spoke and interviewed. They wrote and quizzed. They mathed. They tested in art, music, and economics, lit and history and science. We also laughed and laughed and laughed. My cheeks ache still today. Through trembling hands and voices, clenched teeth and picked nails, our students persevered. They can't specialize in the subject they love; in Decathlon, they do it all. Thus, they experience the highs of acing their strongest subject and the lows of struggling and stumbling through their weakest. It truly is the drama of the teen life rolled into 48 hours of competition! They are why I do it. Each time we hopped into our rental van to shuttle them t...

It was approaching #NaNoWriMo2015 time, my twitter feed spammed with the hashtag I was barely familiar with. I'd seen it before. I knew it had to do with writing. I knew it would be something truly cool if I could meet the criteria, whatever it was. But I wasn't sure. So I did what any modern person would do - I googled it! Answer found.  Next, it crept in onto my Facebook page. My sister-in-law, the writer, publicly declared her participation in #NaNoWriMo. Now this I could get behind! You see, she's completed her first book, Shadow of the Sun , and is working on the next in the series, and I am an anxious reader! She left me on the cusp of a fantastic battle, and I'm ready for the fight! Dutifully, I commented on her post, "You can do it!" Her reply? "YOU can do it too." Oh.  Gauntlet thrown. Touche. Danggit. Don't you just hate it when other people are right? Yes, I could do it too. And what was stopping me? I've made it some...

My New Year's Resolution 2015 was to blog, and I can now officially and publicly declare that it was the first resolution I've actually accomplished in years - maybe even ever! I posted ten whole entries in the last year, and I'm kinda proud of myself! Silly, I know, but it is a big deal to me to be a writing teacher who writes, especially in a space where my students may view my writing. Took me a while to come to this understanding, but I'm here. Writing a million pages of essays for the Teacher of the Year business (only a  slight  exaggeration) nudged the teenaged journaler in me awake again. Rather than ink to paper, my fingers comfortably crafted and revised phrases digitally, and the words called to me. Frustrating and thrilling and frightening and curious, writing my heart changed me. And I found in it something that I actually authentically long to do. Mid experience - a conversation, a teachable moment, a hug - I begin crafting paragraphs in my head. The wor...