About

For now, this blog is a place for me (a high school English teacher — contain your excitement) to think about and discuss the ways art, literature, and education might be woven into a life that is already congested with so much else: work, family, politics, and the endless rush of digitized information.

It’s a bit odd that, after four or more years in college, so many people graduate into a culture that doesn’t exactly celebrate the arts as essential elements of, say, a life well lived. This oddness is more pronounced when your job is to somehow communicate the various virtues and benefits of literature to a segment of the population that, whatever their charms, can tend toward apathy (not always without reason). How do you justify the mandated study of a subject like literature when it seems to provide no social utility or benefit?

I don’t always know, but I’m interested in exploring a part of life that is too often contemplated briefly and in isolation — the part that reflects on what stories actually do for us and why they matter, and why they are worth teaching.