In other news, a friend who is a citizen of another country and in the U.S. legally asked if I thought she should carry her papers with her and I emphatically said yes.

What the fuck country do we live in?

ETA: Interesting that autocorrect changed ‘legally’ to ‘illegally.’

Val Durfee | Substack I move through the shifting roles of life: daughter, mother, grandmother, lover, fiancée, wife, ex, learner, teacher... Always carrying all the women I was and will be within me.

Now I’ve gone and done it.

substack.com/@valdurfee93...

3. First pivot: music education Second pivot: back to English because divorce =hurry up & finish. Secondary education b/c I realized I didn’t like people touching me all the time. 🤣
4. High school English teacher!

1. I wanted to be a teacher since I was too old to be a ballerina & FH couldn’t handle the hours I’d keep as a performer of any ilk.
2. English with an emphasis in Elementary Education

If you went to college
1. what was your career goal when you started?
2. your initial major?
3. if you changed majors, what did you change to?
4. what do you do now?

I tell my students this every time we do a writing project.

Chuffed to get to see John Pizzarelli at Dazzle!

This sounds like an excellent book for the next time I’m wanting to re-read “The Graveyard Book.”

Mr. Mewster resembles someone I know.

I was born & raised in the US and am ethnically Italian & Anglo-Saxon.

Well Peter, I needed that laugh on a morning I woke up at 3:10am thinking of ways to better support the kiddos in my class who are still learning English, yet “the system” expects them to magically be able to read grade-level texts in English.

At the moment, what I post on Bluesky is answers to these questions. Also commentary on the state of education in discussions started by others.

Fucking gutted.

I am not still posting on X/Twitter. I haven’t deactivated my account, mostly because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

I haven’t deactivated any other accounts, but I’m only active on Facebook & sorta on TikTok. I haven’t left mostly because there are folks on there I want to keep up with that haven’t migrated yet.

It kills me people in education don’t get the connection between ELA, literacy, and journalism. I’ve had to explain why I teach various forms of informative writing, including journalism. 🙄

The decline of high school newspapers and journalism as an elective certainly plays into this.

I can’t speak to anywhere else, but media literacy is baked into the Reading, Writing, & Communicating standards for Colorado.

Seems like a decent way to do intros.

I’m on Bluesky largely because people I like & care about are jettisoning Facebook. I’m also hoping for a more positive social media experience.

I’m making very conscious decisions about my network on this here app. Follow me with no connection? Blocked. Post racist/sexist/ablest/super negative BS? Blocked.

Today was a day where I looked in my students’ eyes & saw the load icon just spinning away. It’s not that they weren’t trying, it was like their think boxes were broken.

Coming back from break in an unstable weather pattern a few days before the full moon in rough, y’all. 🤣

Listening in on our Weld 8 school board meeting and listening to my current & former principals do a great job of illuminating why how a school addresses bullying isn’t always obvious to the community.