Ms. Taylor Says

I've been reading a TON of my students' work lately.  Grades are due in the next few days.  By far the most interesting reading has been my students' freewriting on who they admire.  We are currently working on the beginning of our research papers (I say we because I'm writing with them--I am becoming more and more convinced that this is something every teacher needs to do.  It helps me know how effective or ineffective an assignment is, and it gives me a serious dose of sympathy for my writers.  But anyway...back to the topic at hand...)  The research assignment is to come up with someone they think should go on the "Ms. Taylor's Wall of Fame."  They can choose anyone they want as long as they can find enough research on the person; I'm researching Frank McCourt .  They are going to have to write a persuasive research paper explaining why that person is worthy of the wall (they also have to come up with a title--mine is "Best Teacher-Turned-Writ...

Tonight at Bible study we were discussing God's love as discussed in I John.  One of the questions was about how our assurance of God's love changes us and how it affects the way we love others.  As we talked about the amazing power of God's love, I kept thinking about this little kiddo named Ankute .  He is probably my new favorite kid.  I don't actually know him, I just read his mom's blog.  Oh, but I digress.  Anyway, this little guy is a 3-year-old Ethiopian orphan who has recently been adopted by an American family.  His adoptive mom was talking the other day about how he sometimes worries about there not being enough food.  If others get seconds, he worries they will eat it all.  As he spends more time in his new home, he starts to believe that there will be enough food.   I think God's love works in a similar way.  All too often we are like Ankute and the food.  We are so worried that there won't be enough.  That our needs won't be met, that we w...

1. A man in a cowboy hat with a half-smoked, unlit cigar in his mouth, riding the metro 2. A duck. Yep, that's right. I saw a duck sitting on the sidewalk next to the escalator. Not really sure how a duck finds itself in the middle of DC or why it decides to sit with three homeless men by the metro stop, but Kelly and I both decided it seemed rather comfortable there. Not walking around, not looking for food, just sitting on the sidewalk.

This is by far my most memorable inauguration.  The wonderful people at my parents' congressman's office set me up with two tickets to the inauguration.  I invited my friend Todd (the biggest Obama fan I knew).  Here is my picture book of the last few days.   I went on Monday to pick up my tickets.  It was a peaceful experience for the most part.  The metro stop was a bit crazy.  It was actually so crazy that the metro person finally just started letting us all go without using our cards to make it go faster.   You can't really tell how packed it was...   I got to the house office buildings to find quite a bit of a line.  I called up to the congressman's office to make sure I was in the right place.  The awesomely kind person who answered the phone (aka my hero of the day...) offered to bring my tickets to me.  I think this saved me approximately 3 hours of waiting to get in. (Someone said that the news reported a 3 hour wait to get tickets.)  AWESOME!!! I was ecstatic ...

I have been thinking about hope lately. How hope is defined, how we find hope, and who can really offer us hope. I came into my local coffee house today to find they were selling "inauguration" cookies. The lovely cookies had one word written on them--hope. This has become a word strangely synonymous with our soon-to-be president, and I'm not totally sure how I feel about that. On one hand, I think it is good to hope--good to hope that things can and will get better. Good to hope that people really can make a difference. Good to hope that traditions, mindsets, obstacles can change. I find it a good thing to hope for all of these. But I also worry about hope. Worry that sometimes we put all of our hope in people, circumstances, words. I'm not sure that something as powerful and vital as hope can be managed by something as small as a person. Or even a group of people. Partly I think this because hopes are so easily dashed and regaining hope is so hard. So ...