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He what??? My 1986 Elementary School Continuation Commencement Speaker

In my lifetime, I have attended a large number of graduation ceremonies, including several where I walked the stage. Many more have been to honor friends and colleagues who have completed a degree.

Out of the dozens I’ve attended, three stick out. Only one of the three was celebrating one of my accomplishments.

The third […]

Paternal Memories: Elementary School

Last weekend I popped up to see friends, and on Friday we went to pick up my friend’s son at grundschule – elementary school.

I think that it was my first time inside an elementary school in years – to be honest I cannot remember the last time I was inside one – and it […]

On being a little terror – adventures in middle school when I was four.

Smiley Middle School

Now that my friends have kids of school age, I’m starting to hear some interesting stories about schools and how bad their administrations are. Fighting strange school policies on behalf of their kids is a refrain I’m hearing more and more.

Listening to the stories reminded me of a story from […]

Vignettes from Childhood: 5

I don’t actually remember much about kindergarten, other than the fact that my teacher was Ms. Stein (probably Mrs. Or Miss, but I don’t recall – as I look back, she was of a generation that preceded the Ms. prefix). The main reason I remember her name is that she also taught my brother and […]

18:00 CET: Traveling down Colfax at 10 in the morning… on the way to Wyoming

Tuesday morning, before heading north, I went to a coffee shop in order to get caught up on my email—for while I might be on vacation, some aspects of work need somewhat regular attention.

I found myself on Colfax Avenue at 18:00 CET – a warm, sunny, Tuesday morning at 10 in Denver.

February 15th, 2012 | Tags: , , , , , , | Category: memories, Wyoming | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)

Smiley Middle School versus Gove Middle School, 26 years later.

Spring 1986 was an exciting time for me: in that era, middle schools in Denver offered 7th and 8th grade, and as I and my fellow Park Hill Elementary School 6th grade classmates were preparing for Continuation, we were also preparing for middle school.

Students attending Park Hill Elementary School back then were divided up […]

Do you remember a trippy movie about a boy, a witch and pancakes?

I do – it is a film I associate with wintertime, when, after eating lunch, it was too cold and/or snowing to go out on the playground.

On such days, instead of being pushed outside, and out of our teacher’s hair, we were herded into the school gym, where a screen would be set up […]

Thanks for stopping the kissing

Dear Principal Bell,

I just heard the fantastic news that a teacher at your school called the police after witnessing two 12 year olds kiss on the playground.

I think this is fantastic! Nothing like embarrassing two children by calling the cops. It’s unfortunate that the cops didn’t arrest the kids and toss them in […]

Dreaming about the final frontier.

This morning, thanks to Twitter, I realized that Space Shuttle Endeavour was landing in Florida—so I took a few minutes away from work to watch the landing.

Really there are a number of things to consider: First, I could watch the landing live thanks to streaming over the Internet—live feed, straight from NASA on my […]

always hard 2 red

I must come out of the closet: I am a spelling and grammar Taliban.

Maybe that’s a bit too dramatic. I’m not perfect and I do take shortcuts along the way.

Ultimately my goal is to communicate ideas—and each as clear as possible.

I’ve ceded some strict middle- and high-school rules. I’m not as insistent […]