renée a. schuls-jacobson
Functional Illiteracy: The Repost
People who know me know I’m struggling this semester. I try to explain how my students seem weaker this year; how I can’t get them to use capital letters (or, in some cases, how I can’t get them to stop randomly capitalizing words that don’t need to be capitalized); how they won’t stop writing “im” instead of “I’m”; how I can’t get them to stop using the letter “u” when they mean the word “you.”…
Curly Girly Goes Simply Smooth
As she stood behind me in her black and white polka-dotted smock with skinny red trim, Shauna applied the chemicals. Wearing short black gloves that stopped just above her wrists, she painted and combed, making sure to coat every single strand, fussing over my tresses the way no-one has ever fussed before. She was serious about this procedure….
Gratitude From An 11-Year Old
I’ll tell you what I’m grateful for: my son, who decided to take over as today’s guest blogger and gave me a little extra vacation time….
Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Teachers
Even though I am employed by a local community college, I recently decided to conduct an experiment to see if I, with my soon-to-be twenty years of classroom experience, could land even a part-time position in any school district within a desirable radius. I updated my resume and cover letter and applied to four local school districts. Did I get a bite? Not one! At first I was bitter, but now I understand. There are just too many teachers….
Lessons From A Boy In a Skirt
Several years back, on the first day of the semester, a student walked into my classroom. A boy, clearly, a male — wearing a long pink skirt, his hair tied in a low pony-tail. When I read the roster and got to his name, he corrected me and told me that his name was Sophia.
I quickly noted the change.
When I met Sophia, she wanted gender reassignment surgery. She wished for it, but knew it would be a long road. As gender reassignment is an irreversible procedure, two letters of therapy clearance would be required. She explained one therapist (psychologist, psychiatrist, social worker, sexologist) would be required to have a doctoral degree, and one of the two therapists would have to know her for an extended period of time. When I met Sophia, she was simply trying to change the name on her birth certificate and running into all kinds of roadblocks. A ward of the State from age 15, Sophia was living with distant relatives. She had no car, was taking the bus to campus, and had no expendable money for one therapist, let alone two with the kind of credentials that she would need to put her on the path towards gender reassignment….
My Annual Birthday Poem: A Terribly Self-Indulgent, Truly Narcissistic Post
Today is my birthday. I’m um… a year older than I was last year. ;-)…
Biting Off More Than I Can Chew
Whenever I take on a project, where I am in a leadership role, where there are deadlinu couldes, where visible, public failure is possible – I get positively crazed. The desire for perfection makes me hustle to work, work, work – and in striving for perfection, the craziness kicks in. …
Oy Vey: Tips to Non-Jews About Bar & Bat Mitzvah Giving
I received an email from an old friend not too long ago. She sounded kinda panicky:
Renna:
I have been invited to go to a Bat Mitzvah in NYC for a co-worker’s daughter. What do I give? Help!
Jenna 🙂
That Jenna. She brought me right back to October 25, 1979 when I celebrated my own bat mitzvah in Syracuse, New York. …
Are You Proud of Your Sweet Little Bully?
In the all the bullying literature that is out there, there is one piece of the puzzle that hasn’t been particularly well documented, and so I’m putting out there. Guess what? Sometimes parents of bullies are proud that their children are bullies. I have heard parents admit they would rather have their children be the ones “standing up for themselves” than the ones being bullied: that they have actually encouraged their children to get physical first, so that they are never made targets themselves. For me, this is the ugliest, darkest side to parenting….
Cursive as a Font Option?
In the 18th and 19th centuries, cursive was one’s special signature. It distinguished one individual from another. The most elite received special training, and possessing a “fair hand” was considered a desirable trait for both men and women. By the 1960s, a standardized method called D’Nealian Script had been introduced into schools all over the United States, and handwriting became more homogenized. I didn’t know any of this, of course. All I knew was that during “cursive time,” each of us learned to write the same way: on thin, gray paper that consisted of rows of lines: two straight continuous horizontal lines with one dashed line in the middle. We sat with our pencils poised “at the basement” of the line ready to “go all the way up to the attic” or to stop “at the first floor.”…