June 22, 2026
Something I thought about:
- I’ve been immersing myself in reading in a way that I haven’t had a chance to do since my doctorate, and I’ve been noticing the difference between reading for fun and reading with purpose. Since moving back, most of my reading has been fairly spontaneous. I’ve participated in some group slow reads, a couple of which had lightly critical, social aspects. I’m also still in a book group, and we discuss texts from craft and cultural perspectives, but for the most part, I’ve been reading widely and randomly. I’m currently approaching texts through a pedagogical lens, which is different from craft and critical lenses, and I think we tend to minimize the pedagogical perspective. When teaching creative writing, I look for wide-ranging texts that give students a sense of possibility and show them different craft techniques. Right now, as I’m reading, I’m assessing which books will make a student’s world bigger and what kinds of connections we can make to these texts (personal, current events, historic events, etc.). The more types of connections we can make, the better, because we’ll have more entry points for students along with more opportunities to respond through different kinds of writing.
Something I did:
- Last week was the major transition week between end of school and summer. I was decompressing and organizing.
- I’ve been reading a lot — mostly catching up on recent MG and YA books as I prep for school.
- I thought about curriculum and routines and started to go through old materials to see what I like and want to keep. I was pleasantly surprised to see how much we asked students to read and write.
- We went to the town biergarten to hear a friend’s band perform and ran into friends from the next town over.
- We stopped by some independent shops in a neighboring town and then attended a lantern festival where we saw some cool performances (taiko, bagpipes, etc).
- We went for a short hike in a new spot and then tried the new ramen place and checked out the new Asian grocery store in town.
- I walked a lot. The weather was lovely for the most part. That felt good.
Something I read:
- A World Without Summer by Nicholas Day
- Roots by Alex Haley — I finished my slow read
- The Teacher of Nomad Land by Daniel Nayeri
- The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest by Aubrey Hartman
- Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper
- Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga
