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letters after her name . . .
There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher. This upcoming week, I am quite certain that I will not be the only one to invoke Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides. All over America, during Teacher Appreciation Week teachers and their craft are honored with public fanfare and the more personal gestures as well. It’s the time of year when some teachers are counting down the days until school’s out for summer, and then others are figuring out how to make every instructional minute…
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Day 30: clouded by words
“Word Cloud” I know it’s technically Day 32, but Day 30’s challenge to create a word cloud was entirely too much fun with too many choices. Hence the delay. Now I know it wasn’t the most complicated of tasks and should probably have completed in less than ten minutes, but I defy anyone to visit www.wordle.net and leave without “randomizing” the words at least once. Or maybe three times . . . So after creating, deleting, then recreating little clouds of words with myriad fonts, colors, and layouts from which to choose, I finally settled for something simple. It doesn’t say it all, but it says enough about “my cloud” for now…
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Day 29: how to cut a long story short?
I’m not known for my brevity, so today’s Writing Challenge is living up to its name. Can I tell a story in just six sentences? We’ll see. But not today. Immediately, this challenge brought to mind the genius of Ernest Hemingway. As the story goes, “Papa” settled a bar bet with his writing colleagues by crafting a complete tale – beginning, middle, end – in just six words: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. He proclaimed it his finest work, apparently, and it has inspired countless famous and lesser-known writers to try their hand. Perfectly concise, Not Quite What I Was Planning is a compilation of six-word stories that at once expand…
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Day 28: the first time she told anyone
“Write a post about the first time you did something. What is it? What was it like? What did you learn from it?” The first time I realized that my breast cancer was not just about me was when my fourteen year old daughter decided to break her silence about it. In her own way. On Facebook. It was World Cancer Day 2012 I didn’t even know there was such a day. Until then, I had known only about Breast Cancer Awareness October when the weather in Phoenix is perfect for racing for a cure and raising over a million dollars. This past October, I was on a business trip, a little sad…
