Author Archives: cbrannonwatts

I have received messages from former students regularly but yesterday I got two about the same topic: writing. I miss being a teacher. And my former students mean a lot to me, so I take it seriously when they reach out. They wouldn’t if they didn’t need me, and it means a lot that theyContinue reading “a day in the life of a former teacher”

This is what I want to say when you ask me. and there he sits. the old man alone. late in inky blackness, the light shrunken to a stale pool of defiant solidity nightbirds mock. he cannot hear the barrage of inanity; his internal temperature is too high for that, the war raging behind hisContinue reading “Hemingway wasn’t Hemingway until he was Hemingway…”

I feel the need to say something, both as a parent and as a teacher. The latest personal news from DC involves the sharing of lived trauma. This sharing has drawn both support and ire, as is usual within the American political landscape. I feel for what those people lived through, AOC in particular. She’sContinue reading “Trauma Informed Response”

the thing sat there. the raven outside on the wall watched it. not even the fine mist falling this morning made an impact. I too watched, albeit for different reasons. I felt no threat from the object, the thing, the previously-not-there that had appeared some time over night, while it snowed. I was curious though.Continue reading “mechanism”

We struggle with reading sometimes. It’s okay, really – even though I am an English teacher and an Anglophile of the highest order – I get it. My children are fully immersed in French-speaking classrooms, they are doing well and working very hard. I still want them to be kids, something that wasn’t necessarily happeningContinue reading “After Seuss”

Well, it was a shirt on a stuffed animal. A green shirt on a little panda that my daughter calls Pandy. We picked the critter up in London in the long-gone and much lamented pre-COVID19 days… I don’t know why they make these things so fragile (read: I do, but it’s not acceptable), and IContinue reading “I repaired a stuffed animal this morning”