My Thoughts

Draft started 4/16/2020 I'm gonna start this thought before I lose it and before I do any scientific research.  Ugghhh, grad school severely altered my ability to develop a full thought without thinking about quantifying data.  With the craziness of the school closures and distance learning, I've read over and over remarks from teachers about equal access.  I've been there, and sometimes, I linger here still -- the idea that all students should have equal access. It's easy and simple.  I only have to create one lesson plan to push out with the expectation that all students have equal access and that no issues will arise as students complete the assignment.  Ok, none of us teachers really believes this myth.  We may long for it, but we don't believe it will ever happen.  Sometimes, magically, we get close???  Teacher background and education level, age and experience all contribute to ideology.   As an illustration:  younger teac...

 Oh my, I can so vividly remember the excitement, the joy even, of opening the AOL app and hearing "you've got mail"- the eventual reward for waiting for the dial up to reach across time and space to connect to a world that had been so remote only a year previous. I, like so many others, found new friends (connections) in those early chat rooms - reading the conversations of strangers and finding familiar threads of commonality.  For a couple of years, I even had a couple of steady email friends who brought my loneliness into companionship and helped me also discover my sequestered voice again. Even 22 years later, the Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan movie enchants me.  I try to watch it at least once a year and to use it as a guidepost into my own growth.  This year, as I watched it, I was caught off guard to a new fact that I have seemingly ignored for a long time - Joe and Kathleen were "cheating" on their relationships.  The dark and often crippling reality of "in...