I’ve seen this word. I’ve traced its letters, spelled it, tapped it, sang it, formed it with clay, formed it in sand, and closed my eyes real tight and pictured it hundreds of times, times, times, but my brain is like a giant bulb, full of hot air, blinking red.
Alyssa Minaker is a reading support teacher who helps students with dyslexia.
As a pack, my students hold the power. I walk a tightrope every second of every minute at school. One wrong move, one wrong word, and I lose it all. The balance between order and chaos is one child’s silent acquiescence.
They think they know it all…
Mercifully, they don’t.
Joan is an educator in Australia.
“My remarks will be brief today,” an absentminded professor told his class. “I’m suffering from short-turn memory loss.”
“Don’t you mean short-term?” a student asked.
The prof shook his head. “I had the top down on my convertible. When I turned a corner really fast, my lecture notes blew away.”
John H. Dromey has had short fiction published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Betty Fedora, Crimson Streets, and elsewhere.
“Put the tip of your knife in the silvery place where the soft-scaled belly meets tail. Press down. Draw the blade away, not toward. Cleave the meat, and fish out the gnarled black guts; smell the sour salt.”
“And if he tries to help?”
“Say no. This is most important.”
Post-MFA, Lora Rivera worked as a literary agent’s assistant, children’s biographer, e-learning developer, and crepe maker. She likes: rocks and climbing on them, words and chewing on them, people and connecting to them, and ferns because they are old and slow to evolve and so must be very wise. Find her on Twitter or at clippings.me/lroseriver.
“Ha! What you ever done fer me, eh?” I cry.
He towers over me. “You need to learn who runs this school.”
“You can’t tell me nuffink. I got rights!”
“Calm down and do some work.”
“I’m not scareda you,” I say.
I gotta quit teaching. Students isn’t like before.
Arthur Brown has been a teacher for a long time and hopes to be a non-teacher for longer. He loves to dabble in writing and finds the ‘snapshot’ aspect of the fifty-word format suits him.
Nothing…
Silence, wrinkled brows, vacant stares. It all seems so simple. Why can’t they see it?
But wait! A spark, a fragile flicker of hope in the sea of despair.
A word murmured, a spark of comprehension, and the self-doubt is swept away.
Why would I want any other job?
Let’s say a wannabe teacher had to write a 50-word (referenced) teaching philosophy. Let’s say a wannabe teacher Googled “50 Word Stories” and was surprised by what he found. Let’s say a wannabe teacher accepted the challenge that had been inadvertently thrown down. Let’s say a wannabe teacher was a boy named Allen Snelling, a uni student usually on the wrong side of most things , including years.