“Buckwheat, you know it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll find any pieces that actually fit together?”
“I know, Dad. It doesn’t matter, I just want to try.”
This is how I chose to spend my time on our family beach vacations. It’s what I always chose to do – scouring stretches of beach, gathering pieces of sand dollars, filling my bucket until it was nearly too heavy to carry. I would return to our beach blanket and lay out my treasures, carefully arranging and organizing the million tiny pieces. I spent countless hours trying to put them together. It never mattered to me if I actually reconstructed a whole sand dollar. From as early as I can remember, the joy-spring of my endeavors was simply searching for, learning about, and rearranging each unique, broken piece.
genuine curiosity + creative puzzling
This is the very heartbeat of how I think about everything. It’s how I think about teaching, how I think about math, how I think about the students I share space with in middle and high school classrooms. It’s how I think about real life — from sisterhood to daughterhood, from the babies I mama to the babies I’ve lost, from wife-ing to ex-wifeing, from old haunts to new hopes. I have found beautiful & captivating & freeing pieces of identity, belonging, worthiness, brain science, feelings science, math teaching and learning …… so. many. pieces.
So here we are! In a space to wonder about all the pieces, both yours and mine. A place to gather up and piece together. And when needed, a place to break apart what might not belong together and rearrange the pieces into something that unexpectedly does.
Your time and energy are precious resources. Thank you for choosing to spend some of it here, with me. Here’s to repiecing, taking what we find and creating what we need.