Tag: parenting

Thoughts on the Demise of the Tooth Fairy

On By VickieIn familyLeave a comment

In the early 2000s when my kids were very young, I wrote a monthly column for a Los Angeles parenting magazine, but I also spent my free time away from teaching writing opinion pieces, narrative nonfiction, personal essays, political commentary, and anything else that interested me. Some of those were submitted to (and often published in!) a variety of magazines, newspapers, and even websites. Others were never sent anywhere but served as a means of honing my craft. After all, according to Malcolm Gladwell and his book Outliers, I needed to clock my 10,000 hours. So I wrote and wrote.

What follows is an essay I wrote in 2003 – over twenty years ago! The fun part about this is I completely forgot about the day my daughter discovered I was the tooth fairy, leaving me eternally grateful for having captured this in words. 

How about you? Do you remember when your kids discovered that you were the tooth fairy?

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Thoughts on What We Say to Young Adults about the Future

On By VickieIn Current Events, Education, politics, Self DevelopmentLeave a comment

Screen Shot 2019-01-23 at 3.19.17 PMYou can accomplish great things in this life.

That’s it. Now you just have to believe it. Unfortunately, it seems that our media and our educational system is hell bent on convincing you otherwise. And so many of you are taking that to heart. I want to say “Stop that.”

I’d been a college professor (with a brief stint of teaching middle school thrown in for fun) for 25 years when I quit last year. I am not sure if I will ever go back. I’m not sure I want to. But I know academia. It’s my niche. I lived it, and I follow academic news stories in the media somewhat obsessively. One of the reasons I am so interested is that much of what is occurring on a national scale at colleges and universities today are things that already happened at a small community college in Los Angeles, where I was a tenured English professor. I taught there for a total of 16 years, back in the nineties and in the first decade of the 2000s. So what I am witnessing is not all that surprising.

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For Teachers: In Consideration of Students Who Take You At Your Word

On By VickieIn Education2 Comments

I got a text in all caps today from my daughter, who is in her senior year of college. It read: “MY WEDNESDAY CLASS WAS JUST CANCELLED.” That class is next week and is the day before Thanksgiving. I have been in enough classrooms to know that this professor was instant hero. And he knew it too.

Students love when classes are cancelled. In 25 years of teaching college, I rarely cancelled mine. In fact, when I was pregnant with that same daughter, I had students come to me and also write in my evaluations that they thought for sure I would be cancelling a lot of classes because of my pregnancy, and they were surprised (some disappointed, quite honestly) that I never called in sick.

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Thoughts on that which is known as an “empty nest”

On By VickieIn Self Development1 Comment

IMG_4625
The first photo of the three of us.

Adrift.

It’s the word that keeps coming to mind. Adrift. Rudderless. Alone. Confused. Mired in the moment.

I’m struggling. And I knew I would be. And even though I tried to imagine what it would be like once both of my kids were off to college, I couldn’t quite capture it. And now I know why. This feeling is too unfamiliar.

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Pitchers and Pitching

On By VickieIn SeminarLeave a comment

I love baseball.12

My only explanation for that is that I am from St. Louis. How
could I grow up in St. Louis and not come out a baseball fan?? I am not sure it is even possible.

Not only do I love going to the games, keeping score (or sometimes not!), eating a plain hotdog – no mustard or ketchup here! – and having a Budweiser, but I love using baseball as a metaphor for life. Ever since my son started playing (and yes, I was one of those moms who had him in t-ball at the tender age of 4), I have come to realize just how many lessons baseball can afford us in our every day lives.

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