Picturepocket's Blog

Tag: education

  • High School History

    Last weekend, while my oldest was at camp, Tim and I left our youngest with grandma and took off back to my hometown to go to my 30-year high school reunion. It was my first time back to the building since the nineteen-nineties. Our first activity, was to tour the old high school building. From…

  • Idioms

    Good morning class! Today we’re going over some useful idioms. These are colorful phrases that people use, sometimes describing their life or even to comment on yours. We will talk about each phrases’ literal and figurative meaning and whether or not it’s a backhanded compliment. Let’s get started. Ducks in a row. “It looks like…

  • Get Smart

    I am blown away by how effective the after school tutoring program has been so far. After just a couple of months, the middle schoolers are getting right to work and many completing their weekly homework. Some of them even seem to look forward to the time now and call it “club.” Most of the…

  • The Right to Be Wrong

    I just watched the series Transatlantic, another Netflix World War II miniseries set in occupied France. The story is about how some Americans saved artists, writers and thinkers of the 20th century from the Nazi invasion of Europe. Unlike The Light, We Cannot See, this is based on real people in history. It was surprising…

  • Infinite Potential

    Last week, I helped an eighth grader do his math homework. Algebra is not my strength, but we figured it out together. It was about slopes on a graph. There were ten problems and when we finished the seventh, he said he could submit the assignment for a passing grade. I asked him if he…

  • Fifteen Minutes

    Let me tell you about the time I was a little bit famous. When I graduated with my shiny journalism degree in the late nineties, the world was in the middle of a massive transition from paper to electronic mass communication. For local papers, it meant people no longer paid for news that they could…

  • YOLO

    I am laying here in bed trying to sort out some decisions that have come up. In life, there’s mostly a lot of mundane choices, but sometimes there are brief windows of opportunity. The phrase “you only live once” flits through my mind. I think that term was trending a decade ago. This time ten…

  • A Year to Live

    My dear friend’s husband has spend the last year battling cancer. Off and on. He was diagnosed with the dreaded type four, but a good blast of chemotherapy and some intense surgery knocked it back for six months. Then it popped back up and they’re blasting it again. All the latest in medical technology is…

  • Insomnia

    If you listen to conservative news commentators, there is a strong insistence against anything “woke”. What is it to be “woke“ and why are certain people so strongly against it? Basically, the term means a person who has recently become aware of systematic racism, as in “awoken” to a problem that has been occurring for…

  • Cubits & Curiosity

    I was thinking about my Dad recently and his impact in the world. While he never built anything large, nor entertained a wide audience, after his death, for years, I would run into people whose lives he had crossed and created a meaningful connection. One of his talents was listening, not necessarily for relational purpose,…