The marathon is over. The Wild Things have gone home (or what passes as home). All that’s left is bits of ratty paper and crumbly memories strewn through my room, through me. A school year. Nine-ish months of intense proximity. Just like a pregnancy, only with 20: viginitituplets? Puts Octomom to shame.
As I look back [...]

The first month of school is a crucial time in the life of a classroom. Don’t meld them into a working group, and you pay for it for the rest of the year. Classroom life is chaos. Teaching and learning are repeatedly interrupted by stretches of wildness. Days are exhausting. [...]

How do you feel about lines? Most adults, I think, HATE them, unless we’re already in one, and someone cuts into it. Then we want the orderly justice a line promises, be it on the freeway or at Costco. Our inner wild thing wants to become a ruthless enforcer of line order.
Wild kid [...]

We all deal with it. Some more than others. All day I tried to find ways to teach physically. We were pirates (tomorrow being International Talk Like a Pirate Day). We were long vowels standing tall and short ones crouching down. We used unifix cubes all through math.
8 kids mostly [...]
