Hello, Imagine you are a first-year elementary teacher on a grade-level team, and you have a background in theater that you genuinely love. You have been doing readers’ theater with your students, and they are engaged in a way that feels different. It feels meaningful. It feels like something you could build on. So you start thinking about what might come next. A full play for all of the students in your grade level starts to feel like a natural extension of what you have already begun. You...

Hello, Imagine you and I are playing a familiar game: Two Truths and a Lie. It is simple, recognizable, and, in many ways, revealing. Here are mine. I never paint my fingernails. I hate sushi. Two of my children are named after people in my family. Take a second and decide which one is the lie. The lie is that two of my children are named after people in my family. Only one of them is. What makes that lie effective is that it is close enough to the truth to feel believable. It is not...

Hello, I’m short. I’ve always known it. I was never the girl who shot up tall and then plateaued early. I was always the shortest in the class. Always. In fact, I was even voted “shortest” in my high school yearbook, which was odd. I am still not sure how that was something people voted on. It was not an opinion. It was simply a fact. In my family, however, I am of average height. I am taller than my older sister, one of my cousins, and my maternal grandmother. On my mom’s side, we are not...