My second grade students were doing an art project one afternoon. The art teacher was circling the room, helping students glue something to something else. And I was at my desk, grading. I could have gone to the teacher workroom to grade. But I like the children to see me working; to lead by example….
Category: 2 Rules The Magazine
Souls Need a Gentle Touch (An Archaic Concept of Me)
Where we left it at end of previous delivery:Our married life had begun. Summer turned into Autumn. I continued with my freelance work at home, Aleena commuted to her office most days, the leaves fell down around our little front garden, and slowly winter returned. Souls Need a Very, Very Gentle Touch Now that we…
Lone-li-ness
寂寞 鄉下小孩子怕寂寞,枕頭邊養一只蟈蟈;長大了在城裡操勞,他買了一個夜明表。 小時候他常常羨豔墓草做蟈蟈的家園;如今他死了三小時,夜明表還不曾休止。 -卞之琳 Lone-li-ness The boy from the countryside dreaded loneliness,So he kept a grasshopper by the pillowcase;He grew up labouring in town,and bought a watch that shines all night long. As a child he’d always envied the grasshopperswho homed in the graveyard grass;Now the old boy is dead for three hours,The second-hand of…
Quiet Quitting and Education: Stay the Course?
If I stop now, I’m a quitter. I started teaching in 2017, right after I graduated college with a degree in something I didn’t know how to apply. I thought moving to a rural area of the country with a handful of other twenty-something-year-olds who all wanted to “make a difference” would be an adventure. …
Reality Check: The Afterlives of Indie Musicians
Zane Stroud and I used to be bandmates; we left the band and started new lives, and Zane is now heading in my direction–to become an academic. Zane and his wife Bessie drove Zoe and me to Clearwater Bay to celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival. We took this double date quite seriously, because it was our first…
The Wedding (An Archaic Concept of Me, Delivery 9)
We began in Delivery 1 with a vignette. A vignette of lingering kisses, stillness and soft murmurings, bountiful cushions on a big, round mahogany bed, privilege taken for granted, and lithe young minds congratulating each other on their own manifestations of abundance. A vignette delivered to us by a much older version of a young man…
Paterson
Author’s Note: I watched Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson” again for my introduction to literature course, and it kind of set something echoing. A beautiful movie about exactly what I am trying to do: tiny attempts, words, poems. So I wrote this one: Paterson’s morning begins with a bowl of Cheerios and a boxful of Ohio Blue-tip matches….
Homework: A Love Story
As an elementary school teacher, I have never been a fan of homework. During my first year teaching, my Grade-Level Lead Teacher handed me the spelling worksheets and multiple-choice reading activities to send home with the kids each day. I hardly looked at them, and definitely hated grading them. The students with high test scores,…
An Archaic Concept of Me: Mutual Proposal
We are moving into Delivery 8, where we discover more about the early adult life of the fictional characters, Aleena and Stuart. If you prefer to read contiguously from the opening sentence forward, here are links to the previous 7 deliveries onto 2 Rules of Writing. https://2rulesofwriting.com/another-world-within/an-archaic-concept-of-me/ https://2rulesofwriting.com/another-world-within/an-archaic-concept-of-me-2/ https://2rulesofwriting.com/another-world-within/to-the-future-where-we-know-ourselves/ https://2rulesofwriting.com/another-world-within/archaic-concept-of-me-keep-going-son/ https://2rulesofwriting.com/another-world-within/mindfulness-archaic-concept-5/ https://2rulesofwriting.com/another-world-within/archaic-concept-of-me-shoulder-energy/ https://2rulesofwriting.com/another-world-within/forget-it-an-archaic-concept-of-me-delivery-7/ Where we began,…
Falling in Love with Long Reads Again
An uneventful day at the office. “Let’s go for lunch. I’ve got something for you,” said Wen, calling from her windowless cubicle to mine. “I double-subscribed it for twelve months,” she handed me a stack of The New Yorker, packed in clear plastic bags. “Hope you don’t mind – they’re all previous issues.” I clearly…