Lessons from vacation

Chop Wood, Carry Water

 

We just returned from our annual Spring Break vacation to the ocean. So you’ll probably want to avoid me for a few days while I decompress after spending 16 hours in a car with children during the last week. I take a vacation every year with my family and yet I am still surprised at the things I learn. For those of you that haven’t had Spring Break yet, or who won’t be traveling until this summer, here are a few important lessons you might want to remember. 

1) The trip to your vacation spot is going to be worse than you can ever imagine. Traveling with children is similar to childbirth. The only way we do it more than once is by forgetting how horrible it truly was. We learned our lesson this year and we split the kids up (thanks Grandma and Grandpa)! Still, we were a…

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international network for bamboo and rattan

INBAR: In Partnership for a Better World

On Overhearing People Talking About You

The Exxon Spill: 25 Years of Tears

Time has a strange effect on events in our lives. I feel I’m looking through a glass of water when I look back 25 years to this day, March 24, 1989.

SHANNYN MOORE: JUST A GIRL FROM HOMER

Prince William Sound, 2010

Time has a strange affect on events in our lives. I feel I’m looking through a glass of water when I look back 25 years to this day, March 24, 1989.

I’d left Seattle University and the Ballard Lochs on the M/V Westward heading north through the Inside Passage of British Columbia for the sac roe herring fishery in Sitka. No time in my life is etched as clearly as that spring. There is a certain magic about following Spring to Alaska. Per my not so scientific study, I’ve determined Spring moves at about 9 nautical miles an hour, about the same as the hundred foot boat I worked on. The inside passage is glorious. The bow of the boat pushes Technicolor into black and white. Winter gives up her fight to the brilliance of the whippersnapper called Spring. The smell is of thawing earth. Porpoises…

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The Happy Faces of Ghana: Photo Essay by Ryan Bolton

Ryan Bolton • Toronto-Based Professional Photographer

The kids in Ghana are full of life. In all of my travels, they are some of the most happiest, proud and beautiful kids I’ve ever met. And they love to have their photos taken as you will quickly see. I just returned from a 2 week stint photographing with Me to We in small villages along the ocean coast of Ghana. I was tagging along with a great bunch of high school students from Hunstville that were helping build a school for these very kids in Asemkow. The following is a first set of photos from the trip that I will publish. Many more to come.

For now, enjoy these happy faces of Ghana.

Shot in Asemkow, Ghana. Photo by Ryan Bolton.

Shot in Asemkow, Ghana. Photo by Ryan Bolton.

Shot in Asemkow, Ghana. Photo by Ryan Bolton.

Shot in Asemkow, Ghana. Photo by Ryan Bolton.

Shot in…

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3am Dangerous Zone and Working With Pride

atelier emily

My father lost his job this past January, coincidentally while I was paying them a short visit. It did not come as a surprise to him and – although I wouldn’t put it past him to hesitate discussing his emotions with his daughter – he seems pretty happy about retiring for good, puttering around the house playing Myst or Riven for the 15th time or reading The Hunger Games.

One of the reasons he cited for being fairly happy was that he hadn’t liked how his workload had continued to increase in the latter part of his career. He had felt pressure to be on-call at hours outside of his scheduled work time, and had seen others’ personal lives slowly assimilate into their office lives until they were nearly one and the same. Specifically, he had seen this in his younger peers, and assumed that they would hire a…

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Reading Out of Context

dr. p.l. (paul) thomas

ac·a·dem·ic: adjective a-kə-ˈde-mik having no practical importance; not involving or relating to anything real or practical.

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Currently, I have three seniors on track to certify as secondary English teachers doing extended field experiences in local schools—one is placed in an eighth-grade ELA class and another is teaching college-bound students in a high school.

While observing at the middle school, I arrived early one day while the full-time teacher was finishing a discussion of Walter Dean Myers’s Monster. The teacher had to cut the read aloud short, and one student begged for him to continue reading. The teacher asked for the books to be passed forward, prompting that same student to ask to hold on to his copy so he could keep reading (the teacher arranged for the student to retrieve a copy later, by the way).

In the high school class, the teacher-to-be has been teaching poetry by…

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