My Cardboard Balcony

This week, I officially completed my student teaching at Sir Francis Drake High. I said goodbye to many of my students, congratulated a handful of them at their graduation ceremony today, and walked into one of my classrooms for the last time to see some lovely farewell notes from one of my mentor teachers. Leaving Drake was the epitome of bittersweet. While I'm excited to be moving on from that chapter of my life, I worked with some amazing individuals in my classes. My students all had tremendous talents and insights on the world, and each one had a personality that I admired. We laughed a lot, we discussed a lot, we wrote a lot, we read a lot, and most of all, we all learned a lot. I am so grateful for the opportunity to know them, and who knows, maybe some of them will try to stalk me on social media. As one student of mine quipped, "#findroddie!" While I'm attempting to wrap up all the little nitty gritty details for my teaching credential and trying to becom...

Not In The "Club" by Belinda Roddie I made you a sandwich, but you're allergic to bread.

I woke up in total darkness. The doctor was beside me - I knew that because I could hear him breathing, and his exhalations reminded me of the trains that scraped along the tracks by my window every night. I thought I also heard my mother weeping, and the beeping of the machines that had been keeping me alive for two weeks was synchronized with the doctor's respiration. I didn't need anyone to tell me that I was blind, but given the massive infection that had been in my brain, I could've been a lot worse off - like dead.