Tales from the Fourth Grade: The Best Field Trip EVER

Teachers will tell you that one of the hardest parts of any school year is the planning and execution of field trips. While students are looking forward to a “day off” from the classroom, teachers and administrators are scrambling to get permission forms returned and figuring out driving and chaperone arrangements. Though I didn’t have …

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Tales from the Fourth Grade: Make a Joyful Noise

While my students were writing out their first book report for the quarter in cursive (my kids will have non-forgeable signatures, thanks very much), I decided to play some music to keep them motivated. Eva was enjoying my classical music and asked if we could listen to songs from Phantom of the Opera. I first …

Happy Climbing: How to Overcome Obstacles

My family is blessed to own property on a beautiful island in northern Lake Michigan. While it is the largest island in Lake Michigan, Beaver Island is not exactly brimming with activities or tourist attractions like Great Britain in the Atlantic, or Australia or Hawaii in the Pacific. It is a place to unwind from …

Tales from the Fourth Grade: Sing, Sing a Song

Something had to be done. The majority of my fourth grade girls had been singing “My Favorite Things,” loudly and off-key for a good minute now. I took a deep breath and approached the throng clustered around a poetry book that contained the lyrics. My students, singers and non-singers alike, eyed me with cautious curiosity. …

Tales from the Fourth Grade: For the Love of Literature

I went into the school year expecting great things from my new set of fourth graders. As all teachers will freely admit to, we spend time during the year regaling our coworkers with stories of our students, and so I already had a favorable impression of my incoming class from tidbits I had acquired. I …

Teach Like a Pirate: Building Rapport, Student Engagement, and Creativity

While reading Dave Burgess’s highly popular educational tome Teach Like a Pirate, I discovered several key elements were repeated over and over again. These elements tie directly into the acrostic PIRATE, which stands for Passion, Immersion, Rapport, Ask and Analyze, Transformation, and Enthusiasm. While Burgess contends that a successful teacher will implement all of the …

Ignoring the Elephants in the Room: A Review of Avengers Endgame

You might be aware that I am a huge MCU fan, and I wrote a rather scathing review of Infinity War which can be found here: https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/peruseandmuse.blog/657. I ended that review by saying the writers had a chance to redeem many of their issues with the introduction of time travel in Endgame, but that I …

Love and Peace: Tolstoy’s View on Spiritual Love

After a long, hard journey with many halts along the way, I finally finished Leo Tolstoy's gargantuan depiction of the Napoleonic wars: War and Peace. The book, at over a thousand pages, is not for the faint of heart or the easily distracted. After reading a particularly tedious description of the war portion of the …

Ephemeral Impressions

Dear Peruse and Muse readers: Today my entry will be different as I share some happy news in regards to my writing. I have been accepted at https://channillo.com/ to publish a series of poetry. My series is called Ephemeral Impressions (https://channillo.com/series/ephemeral-impressions/) and will be going live on Wednesday, April 10. If you have enjoyed my …

Why I Write

Have you ever felt defined by one characteristic? The world sees just one facet of your personality and latches onto it with zero compunction. Maybe people only see the dark side of your persona, or maybe they assume something about yourself based on a quick first impression and never take the time to truly get …