Earlier this month, a student at my daughter's public high school found a pile of .22 caliber bullets on the floor of a boys' bathroom. A day before, a threatening note was discovered in the same restroom, inside a stall. On top of the tissue dispenser. In February, three similar...

What I do now is look at people's pockets. When they walk by on the street, or in the supermarket; when they sit on the bench where my daughter plays tennis. My eyes turn down, to the spot on their hips, and latch on. Used to be, I admired their...

"It's time for a stretch," I announced, watching the :59 flip on the dashboard clock. "We don't want to get phlebitis." Riding in cars was something I did expertly, having toured every Colonial homestead on the northeast corridor by the time I could say "butter churn." If you didn't stop...

On a Saturday afternoon in 1968, a massive dead maple slammed to the ground in New Rochelle, New York, taking a chunk of our living room with it. The tree snatched the corner of our shingled split level and crashed onto the front yard, a velvety green expanse with a...

When I became a mother, I don't remember filling out an application, or submitting a resume, or answering silly questions about my strengths and weaknesses. My obstetrician back in Boston did not check first to see that I hadn't assaulted anyone in a supermarket or stolen from company coffers before...

Soon after moving to the Bible Belt from Boston, my daughters asked me what Christmas was. They were four and five. I felt ill-equipped to provide a comprehensive answer, so I suggested that we go and do a little field research, as it was holiday time. I looked in the...

As a child, my mother fell asleep listening to the adults at the end of the hall. It was the 1940s, and relatives visited each other in the evenings and sat up and talked. They spoke about the baby, sometimes, the baby who arrived a few years before Mom did,...

According to the research, I am supposed to be miserable. I am supposed to die years before everyone else. And my kids, well, they are going to be failures. No, wait, let me check, they are already failures.

Being a single parent is difficult at times, yes. And then,...

A few days before any scheduled departure, The Red Thing would emerge from the upstairs hall closet. Not beastly or enraged, or alive even, as the name implies, the Thing in question was entirely, and inanimately, safe.

It was, simply, a bag. A canvas sack with exposed zippered pockets, a...

Some people are habitual cheaters. They cheat all the time, on anything. Taxes, husbands, card games. Some people would never contemplate the notion. I'd venture to say that many of us human beings, though, when faced with a real and significant threat, might just weigh the odds.

As...

I began the conversation early.

"Listen, there will be male people in the nursery," I warned, the moment her beanie-clad head hit my bosom. "You may be placed next to them. Do not worry. Just do not look, no matter what they do. And they will do things. They...

For those of you just now catching glimpses on your television sets of Texas Governor Rick Perry, and listening to assorted people talk about his viability as a presidential candidate, not to mention his coif, here's a little peek from within state lines.

This one peek should be enough....

I have begun the countdown. There are four years to go. I realize this may seem a little early to start scratching off the days on the calendar, so far ahead of The Day, The Very Big Day, just around the corner in 2015. But I cannot help it. Something...

Rae sings. She sings every morning in English class, before we begin. It is the ritual, and we have all come to depend on it, for assorted reasons, inspirations.

One day during the winter, Rae mentioned that she would be auditioning for the school talent show that afternoon. She hadn't...

As promised, a followup:

I wrote in these pages several weeks ago about what happened when the assistant principal at the Dallas middle school where I teach asked me to change report card grades, to pass students who had failed. I refused, and was immediately stripped of students,...

The day after I submit grades for the first marking period of the year, I get a visit from the assistant principal. She walks into my classroom carrying a huge stack of forms.

"You're going to have to change all of the failing grades to passing," she says, slapping the...

Before class began the other day, one of my students asked me about how the heart functions. She needed to write down an answer on a homework sheet.

"What do you think the heart does?" I asked her.

"I don't know."

"No idea?"

"No. Breathing?"

I teach...

Sometimes, I like to say olé. I like the sound of it, the festivity. You can't say olé without feeling a kick. But I don't say it at school. I am careful not to say it at school.

I don't permit Spanish in my classroom. Not because it isn't a...

So, here's a party game:

Say you have a state with 4.6 million public school students. It's ranked 49th, nationally, in performance on the verbal SAT; 46th in math. Just about 61 percent of students graduate from high school (43rd out of 50), laying the foundation for a last-place...

A few minutes after the start of fourth period, a student whom I do not know walks into my classroom, smiling.

"How are you?" he says. Behind him, another student appears in the doorway, and then, two more. These, I know. One will come again during...