By Jane Highley Just kidding! I’m NOT the person who should be writing anything with this title. In fact, I should be the one consuming all the books, blogs, and any other resource available with the words “how” and “tween” in the title. In the short time span as a mom of a 10-year-old tween,...
Category: Jane Highley
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Time in the New (School) Year
By Jane Highley The new year beckons many of us. The new school year, that is. For many people in America, the back-to-school season is more of a new beginning than January 1. Unlike the first day of the new calendar year, the weeks leading up to that first day of school involve much more...
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Preconceptions and Relationships
By Jane Highley I spent four weeks this summer taking a crash-course on the foundations of American Constitutionalism in Washington, DC. As part of my graduate studies in American history, this course was designed to provide solid scholarship on the political, constitutional, and legal history of the framing and ratification of the Constitution. I had...
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When an Arm Breaks, Love Is…
By Jane Highley In mid-March, on a Sunday morning, I went for a run. Not even 3 miles in, I was down with a broken arm: a mid-shaft fracture of the left humerus, to be precise. I had slipped on a thick patch of ice and broke the backward fall with my arm. I’ll skip...
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Deep Work
By Jane Highley For the past seven months, I feel as though I’ve been swimming in history books. Not because I am using them to teach my 8th-grade history class, but because they are required texts for graduate school. As a newly matriculated grad student with an already full load of work and family life,...
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Failing Forward
By Jane Highley There is a huge bulletin board in my classroom with the words “Famous Failures” in the center. Around that title, there are more than a dozen examples of how historic heroes and pop-culture giants have failed. I created this bulletin board to convey a singular message: failure is valuable. The more I...
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A Summer Update
By Jane Highley Summer is not over (hardly), yet the end feels dreadfully near. The back-to-school ads have been consistent and catchy ever since we feasted on burgers on Independence Day. But they only serve to remind us teachers this universal truth: summer is unjustly the shortest season. I wrote a post about six weeks...
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A Teacher’s Summer Syllabus
By Jane Highley Summer has finally arrived, and like many teachers, I am already basking in the freedom of a slower-paced life. For the next 10 weeks, I don’t need to fret about the daily school-day hustle: packing lunches, making and revising lesson plans, attending meetings, collecting feedback, and grading assessments. However, I hardly just...
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What I Know Now
By Jane Highley I used to think that, as the daughter of a Presbyterian pastor, my sins could never really be shared or confessed because of how they would somehow taint my father’s reputation. But now I know that my identity as a daughter of the King is secure, and that my sins are completely...