Want to know a little secret? At one point, I received a participation trophy. Actually, it wasn't just one trophy. I used to have multiple participation trophies. I know, right? I'm from the tail end of Generation X. I'm not a Millennial. They're the ones who were constantly given reinforcement, handed trophies for just showing …
Continue reading Personal Archaeology 24: Awarded for Showing Up
Yes, that is my badge from when I worked at Marshalls for 3 months in the fall of 1994. Yes, I still have it. So I have probably been watching too many teacher complaining and teacher quitting TikToks lately, which I can't say is the most healthy thing, especially considering how exhausted I have been …
So I have been part of a listserv for My So-Called Life fandom for 20 years. The emails flowed from a trickle to a complete stop years ago when a number of us shifted over to social media or moved on altogether, but back in October, it sprang to life again for a little while. …
Continue reading Personal Archaeology 22: On College, Philosophy, Love, Friendship, and Acceptance
The last two of my journals, which chronicled my junior and senior years of high school. I've been trying to figure out how to write this post, because once I finish it, I will be completely done going back through the paper notebook journals from junior high and high school. They began sometime in the …
Continue reading Personal Archaeology 21: Unexpected Moments of Normal
I don't know the exact date that Kate and I officially broke up, but it was 25 years ago right before I was about to head off to my sophomore year college, and while I know that the end of our relationship caused me an enormous amount of pain, I barely wrote about it in …
"Erika 9 typewriter" by shordzi is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 I'm helping my seniors with their Common Application essays in my AP Lit class. This is, I fully admit, one of my favorite things about the beginning of the school year. It's an assignment that helps me get to know them but also lets me put on my …
Part of my 1994-1995 scrapbook project. At left: an essay about being in Paris. At right: a page of all of us taking pictures of each other taking pictures at the top of The Arc De Triomphe. Among the three notebooks (and several folders of MS Word files) I have left from my personal journal …
On my phone, there's a screencap from an old Innovative Educator post that begins "The unspoken truth about teaching writing in school is that few people doing so are writers themselves."* The first two paragraphs of the post I screencapped. I removed distinguished characteristics of the blog, but you can Google all of this to …
Continue reading Personal Archaeology 17: When I Was A Teacher Blogger
I copied it down in a notebook and then transcribed it to my journal sometime in the fall of 1993 at the start of my junior year of high school. I tended to sit in the back corner of Mr. Kalman's APUSH class and the classroom had the ancient type of school desks with attached …
Continue reading Personal Archaeology 16: Cries for Help on a Desk
By the time I was old enough to register who my great Aunt Frances was, she was an "old Italian woman" the way that many of my fellow "Italian-by-way-of-Brooklyn" connazionales would recognize from their own families. Short, bearing and incredible resemblance to both her sister Mimi and my grandfather John, Aunt Frances lived int he …
Continue reading Personal Archaeology 15: The Book of Questions
The Uncollecting 