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
Last time I wrote one of these entries, i was looking at an old underground student newspaper and the cringiest of cringeworthy essays in my teenage journal that responded to it. This would have been journal notebook #2, which I had during my sophomore year of high school and into the very beginning of my …
Continue reading Personal Archaeology 14: Diagnosing My Sophomore Self
So if you go listen to the latest episode of Pop Culture Affidavit, you'll get to hear me and Michael Bailey talk about Pump Up the Volume. It's a film that I consider to be one of the seminal films of my generation, and watching it for the first time in a number of years …
Had I really been on my game last month, I would have written about my high school graduation 25 years ago on June 25 instead of a week or two later. As it happened, I didn't do much to commemorate the anniversary on the actual day, aside from making a comment on a friend's Facebook …
Continue reading Personal Archaeology 12: Things Left in the Wake
So I would be a complete liar if I said that I had forgotten that I held onto my cap, gown, medals, yearbooks, T-shirts, and other commemorative items from my senior year of high school. Oh sure, all of the stuff (with the exception of my class T-shirt and yearbooks) wound up in the same …
Continue reading Personal Archaeology 11: Standing on Ceremony
Somewhere in the September 1991 part of my teenage journal is a transcript of the time I called up my crush and asked her out. I feel like I need to let that marinate for a moment because it might take a moment for you to understand that I called this girl up, asked her …
Continue reading Personal Archaeology 10: You’re a Pathetic, Lovesick Loser Charlie Brown!
There's been this thing going around the internet this week where people post pictures of themselves at the age of twenty. It's coincided with people sharing their senior class photos, which was some sort of "solidarity with the class of 2020" thing that I didn't understand*, but I don't know the reason behind the twenty-year-old …
Perhaps it was a search for something profound. Maybe I was looking for a sense of identity. No matter the reason, I collected a serious number of quotes when I was in high school and college, and as I attempted to start the "next chapter" of my life (as dictated by the journal I got …
Continue reading Personal Archaeology 8: Can I Quote You on That?
The Uncollecting 