Saturday, June 30, 2012

Hitting the Restart Button


Well.  It’s well past the end of everyone's school year and I’m finally ready to start writing again.  How’s that for timing?  But when you fall off a horse, you have to get right back on (that’s right, I’m a WORDSMITH!), so consider this my restart button. 

Part of the reason I didn’t have time to write last year was because my grandmother was very ill.  So when I wasn’t at work, I wanted to be at the hospice with her.  I'm telling you this because this is primarily a blog about teaching and Mary O’Neill was the best teacher I've ever known.  She had a remarkable love of learning (we’re talking about a lady who got her BS in biology in the 1940s!), raised four scarily intelligent children on her own in a time when that was not-a-thing-you-did, found a good job and worked harder and more cheerfully at it than almost anyone I’ve ever known and exhibited a warmth and kindness that I strive to take with me in the classroom and in life.

I have a new, daunting challenge starting up in September that I’ll talk about in another post- but I know I’ll be drawing on Grandma Mary's influence as I rise to meet it.



Scrappy Teacher is happy to be back!