JOY is my favorite word in the English language. I like it for its impact in just a few letters.…
2021
“Joy — it’s not just a gift. In a sense it’s also a duty, a task to fulfill.” (from Astonishments…
Lately, the world has been opening up here in our corner of Los Angeles, and I’ve been crying, a lot.…
We talked about race and othering, about passion versus reason, about women finding their voices, about how easy it can…
In and out of school, among the people I know best, I sense an unmeasurable growth taking place, the kind…
It was a book about a collective of children who survived the end of the world. Alone in a world…
I work with small groups of students who have flunked Algebra and Geometry. I help them understand the material enough…
Sometimes, our best lessons are the ones we hope we never have to teach.
What I felt about each student couldn’t be found in the cells of excel or in the margins of my…
On New Year’s Day in 2020, I was in Shanghai with my family. We watched the ball drop in New…
During the casual chitchat that preceded a meeting of Maryland school heads amid a late January snowstorm, everyone was discussing…
Editor’s note: Listen to Stephen Valentine narrate his story (9 minutes, 11 seconds). 1. Last summer, when my family’s quarantine…
Tired. Depleted. Grumpy. The pandemic is wearing. We are long past novelty and the adrenalin that carried us through summer. In our community, numbers were…
