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“I don’t know. I’m making this up as I go along.”
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Early in the 1994 film adaptation of Jurassic Park, we are shown what appears to be a basketball court in an inexcusable state of overgrowth: a large, fenced-in rectangle of assorted prehistoric foliage with a fairly conspicuous lack of dinosaurs. We can hear, however, high-pitched screeching noises and dull collisions, and the fence rattles. The park game warden, Robert Muldoon – a pithy, unsmiling Australian with an affinity for honestly-pretty-short khaki shorts – explains that the pen holds velociraptors (the dinosaur supervillains of the film) but that they are kept below ground level due to safety concerns. The park attorney, a short, unlikable…
read more »Well, I’m back in the warm and welcoming arms (and the warm and welcoming 400 thread count sheets) of the Meriden Comfort Inn, back where it all began some five weeks ago. Though it was fairly pleasant yesterday, the weather has since quickly corrected itself and returned to the nasty grey perma-drizzle of Induction, thus…
read more »Well, I just wrapped my last teaching day at institute. I’ll try to write a more comprehensive wrap-up post sometime soon, but I thought I’d share two things for now. First – institute has introduced me to a strange new world of adult pleasures. That’s not half as raunchy as it sounds, either. The tiny,…
read more »Last Thursday, I experienced what was easily the single most ludicrous event of my entire life. While I know that a good number of people at the New York City institute have already heard this story, I will attempt to retell it here one final time in the hope of preserving a single, definitive account…
read more »I’ve been putting off this blog post for a while because I feel like I could write a dozen pages for every day I’ve spent in the classroom. Trying to condense everything I’ve experienced into a few paragraphs, the process of selecting the events I deem to have been the most important – it’s pretty…
read more »Here’s a brief institute anecdote. So the sleep to work ratio is unreal. The vast majority of us stay up til at least midnight, and many people stay up significantly later than that. This wouldn’t be a problem if we didn’t have to wake up at five in the morning. Point is, we don’t sleep…
read more »Week two, day one – that most anticipated of days. The first day in the classroom. I’ll refrain from editorializing for now – my feelings and perceptions are all over the place, and I’ll put up a genuine update in a few days once I’ve had a chance to sit and collect my thoughts. I…
read more »was stupid-fun. Granted, it’s not over – it’s only Saturday night – but I would imagine tomorrow will be spent getting ready for my first-ever day teaching real live students on Monday (scary). So after an abortive attempt at having fun in Manhattan last night, I went back again today with a crew of CT…
read more »I have now been officially hired as a ninth grade English teacher at Hartford Public Schools’ Freshman Academy.
read more »Well, the second day of institute has come to an end. To recap – on Sunday we traveled from Meriden, CT to New York City and we’re now staying in dorms at St. John’s University in Queens. The first day of institute, I have to admit, was hell – I got something like two hours…
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