While I was teaching, people kept saying, “Write about this!” I always answered, very truthfully, “I can’t teach and write about teaching at the same time. I have this strange need to sleep every night, and what I write is poems. Short poems.”
I spent two years, after I retired, writing this blog, and it helped me explore my teaching experience and figure out, post by post, what it all meant. The world continues to be full and busy and loud with ideologies about what works in education. I wanted to revisit some real experiences that had worked for real live students, and think about why and how–and I’m so glad I did that, glad that these posts are still proving useful to people from all over the world.
I’ve always combined writing and teaching, one way or another.
I’m a member of Every Other Thursday, a long-lasting, both challenging and supportive workshop of poets mostly from the Boston area. (Zoom lets me continue to meet with them from Maine, where I live now.) My most recent book of poems, Pebble Leaf Feather Knife, was released by Cherry Grove in 2019. A new book, Stitching, will be released by Every Other Thursday Press in January 2026. I also have a new website centered on my poetry life, at pollybrownpoet.com.
But this blog is mostly about teaching. From 1988 through 2013, I taught at Touchstone Community School, in Grafton, Massachusetts, working mostly with 10 to 12 year old students, exploring not only reading and writing but also social studies and math and science, and some music and art around the edges. The whole universe! You can read some things I wrote for parents, while I was teaching, at http://pollybrownteacher.blogspot.com
I’ve treasured the ways both students and teachers learn in authentic classrooms, the richness students can create for each other (given the chance), and the ways all the adults involved with learning can collaborate with each other, nourishing respectfulness, joyfulness, exhilarating growth, and playfulness both wacky and sublime.
In the simultaneously wacky and sublime category, my students and I made a number of videos, and you can see some of them at my channel, hersonstone1, on YouTube.
So here I am, thinking it all over, feeling so lucky to have led both these lives, as writer and as teacher. Please join the conversation!
a year to think it over 
I like your idea of a game surrounding a miniature natural history museum guided by Holling’s comment in “Minn of the Mississippi.” In fact, let me roll with your idea and mention it (with a credit to your insights) in a future entry to my Holling blog, http://hollingcholling.blogspot.com/. Many thanks!