Emergency Sub Plans

I wish I remembered the morning of the day Logan was born, but I was so incredibly tired that everything about that year is a blur.  I'm guessing that Brad and I rode together to school.  Maybe I was too pregnant to touch the pedals :-). I do remember, though, when I first felt the labor pains, and I thought, "I'm not ready!"  My sub plans weren't perfect (Cindy Coker probably laughed uproariously at my plans.  I wrote things like, "say, 'What do you think the theme of this book is?' and then walk to the right side of the classroom and point to the theme poster."  Like Cindy couldn't figure anything out for herself.  Like she is not amazing.) When Logan came into this world.  .  . well, he just came.  Labor and delivery was rather uneventful.  Brad sat in a chair, the nurse was very helpful (actually, she was the amazing part of the experience), and we had a baby at 11:23 PM Thursday, February 26. What was otherworldly was my exha...

I'm going to keep the editorializing short, because I am exhausted by travel, and graduate school, and school responsibility, and life.  I'm actually cheating a bit, I think: these 10 are things I know to be true, but I picked all of them up from other people. 1.)  From my mother, about racism:  I dare you to have someone over to your house for a meal and then hate them. 2.)  From my father, about bullying:  You can't stop them from hurting you or even killing you -- all you can do is set the price.  Make your price high. 3.)  From DeeDee:  Nothing, and I mean nothing, passes a slow evening like a good western. 4.)  From Papa:  Life sometime stinks, Motorscooter, but when it does you can always go get a Chocolate Soldier at the Wynnburg Grocery. 5.)  From MeeMaw:  Interesting?  You haven't known interesting until you've flipped the dial on a police scanner in Lake County, Tennessee. 6.) From Carol Denton:   You...

Last year I found Sarah Kay.  If you haven't found Sarah Kay and plunged headlong into her spoken-word poetry, you must get yourself to Ted and watch " If I Should Have a Daughter ."  You won't regret it.   And then go to her YouTube page and just, y'all, I don't know, wish you and she were best friends-- or maybe that is only me.  I am always wishing myself into friendships:  Glennon Melton , Jenn Hatmaker , Sarah Bessey --they are all my besties in the imaginary community in my head.  We sit around, drink really strong coffee, have incredibly deep and witty conversations, write really profound things, and make each other into amazing people--or at least drink really strong coffee and laugh.  Of course, there is only a coffee shop in my head--no vomit, no laundry, no papers to grade, no crusty oatmeal bowls.  Just strong coffee and friendship. Anyway.  Back to Sarah Kay.  In her Ted Talk, she talks about asking her students to write ...

Leave it to Brad to point his almost Ph. D educated brain at me ( like Glennon Melton's famous avocado--if you are a monkey who reads Momastery ).  So I am going to do with this question what I used to do in college when a professor threw a question like this at me, and I thought, "Oh my goodness!  I have never, ever pondered such a thing.  I wonder if there are in sausage biscuits left at Uncle Dave's store."  I'm going to bob and weave and mold the topic to fit who I am-- a pretty smart person, who thinks deeply about some things, just not this. So the question I am going to respond to is.  .  . What do you hope/want the future of the publishing industry to be?  What books would you like to see on the shelves?  What do you hope is the next stage in the literary world? As a semi-voracious reader and a educator of middle school aged children, I have been yearning for awhile for certain types of books. For my semi-voracious reader self, I ...

            When I was a wee first semester M.A. student at Georgia Southern University I took a course in Dante.   It was rather ambitious, I’ll admit, but at that time my intention to receive a graduate degree in English was rather ambitious; up to that point the closest I had gotten to utilizing that B.A. was my stellar work during nights and weekends at Barnes and Noble.   To my shock and surprise, though, our entire first four-hour seminar class concerned NOT ONLY Dante himself nor JUST the six phrases of Italian I had hurriedly memorized in the week prior to the course when I learned I had misread the prerequisite language requirements. Instead, our diminutive professor announced that we would use our study of Dante to speculate about and identify the Next Big Thing – she explained that literature was merely a succession of historical movements that echoed societal ones, and that “any idiot” could analyze trends to...

I was under the mistaken impression that our blog entries would be lighthearted taunting of Twilight fans, or things like "Why I still buy every album that John Cougar Mellencamp releases."  Love? Ephemeral and capricious, eternal-yet-temporal love?  That's more revealing than I want to be. I am tempted to craft my response solely from song lyrics.  Consider Blues Traveler: Time is fleeting -- time's a wasting and time is bleeding, forever racing. And time is money and money is time,  but love does none of these, Love does none of these. Or, for the more cynical among us, maybe some early 90s U2: Love is clockworks And cold steel, Fingers . . . too numb to feel. Squeeze the handle, Blow out the candle, Love is blindness. There's a great line in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five that says something to the effect of how Billy Pilgrim's mother, like so many Americans, tries to craft life's meaning out of things she has p...

So Brad lives in the high school world--the one with the really big boys who have to duck to get into doors.  I live in the junior high world--the world where I have students follow me into the restroom asking me questions like, "Mrs. Denton, do you really want us to print out those stories you asked us to?  I mean, really.  Because you did not spend an entire day teaching us how to print, so I was wondering.  .  , " or "Mrs. Denton, are those your boots under the stall?  I really like them.  Where do you shop?  Whaaaat?  You're on Pinterest?  Me, too!" or "Hi, Mrs. Denton" (then child awkwardly stands too close to me while I wash my hands). My sweet honors 7th graders and I are in the midst of finishing up A Midsummer Night's Dream , so we have been talking about love for a few weeks now, and it's February--the month of the groundhog, African Americans, and loooooove.  Plus, I saw Fiddler on the Roof  this weekend which is...

Top "A Country Boy Can Survive?" Who can top Waylon? Or wait? Hank?  Or is it Paul McCartney? If you are with me and I am with this blog thing long enough, you will find that song lyrics or attributing them to the right people are not my strong suit (actually details are not my strong suit: names, dates, times, etc.) So it was really unfair for Brad to remember something from high school because I remember NOTHING from high school.  And not because I dropped acid.  Anyone who knows me knows that I did not inhale, imbibe, or get into anything except for MY incredibly baggy pants and Keds :-).  I think--cause, you know, I can't remember. I do remember vaguely that our class motto was "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail," which was attributed on Brainy Quote to Ralph Waldo Emerson (cause I had to look it up), but I don't think we attributed it to him.  Sorry, Ralph (we are on a first name basis because I...

Welcome to Emergency Sub Plans, a safe oasis for two married teachers to scream at one another.  As this site grows in its horrible legacy, I am certain you will learn more than you ever wanted to know about the two of us.  For now, let us begin. Today's Topic is inspired by my sixth period (12th British Lit) who had an assignment to do for me that required real work, but chose instead to concentrate 45 minutes on THE VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION OMG MR. DENTON YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND US -- what should my senior quote be? To honor them, we have decided to thrust ourselves (yes, that's an awkward verb) into their lives, but to bring some of the flair and jalapeno salsa that we ourselves are known for . . . you want a senior quote?  WE WILL GIVE YOU ONE. My vote for senior quote has to be the most popular senior quote from my graduating class, Dyersburg, Tennessee 1993:  "A country boy can survive." -- Hank Williams, Jr. Bonus points for variations from the song tha...