archive of blog posts
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Why I mentor
As an exercise to wrap up the training this week, I’m supposed to draft my personal mission statement / elevator speech explanation of why I mentor at WGU. I’m an educator. It’s what I do. It’s what I am. When I was a kid, I used to pretend sometimes that I was a teacher, and…
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Good night, sweetheart, well it’s time to go
I hate goodbyes. It’s better to say “see you next time,” because that leaves all kinds of hope shimmering in the sunlight. It’s hard to leave something, somewhere – wherever you’ve found yourself for the last while, working and building and arguing and creating. But to everything there is a season, says the Preacher. And…
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When the levee breaks
Sometimes all the crappy stuff kind of hits at once. I’ve noticed this. Life has a rhythm; sometimes the drummer setting the beat is Sorrow or Calamity or Hardship. My train of thinking today has been all over the place. It started actually with feeling all the things rather than thinking them. Sometimes I have…
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Hugo Awards 2016 – Novellas
Yay! I am happy to report that I genuinely enjoyed every selection in this category. These long works of short fiction (oxymoron, no?) have the space to develop good characters and deliver a good plot punch within their 50-100 pages. If you can find any of these, and some are online, they’re each worth your…
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Review: Hugo Awards 2016 – Novelettes
What is a novelette? you ask. It’s what, as an English teacher, I would’ve called a short story just a little bit too long to assign for one night’s homework. (That makes novellas, to me, about a week’s worth of high school homework.) I found more to like among the Novelette nominees for the 2016…


