• Book Reviews - Writing

    Beyond the Kite: 5 Life Lessons from Benjamin Franklin

    February 24, 2024 - By 

    The Harvard Five-Foot Shelf is a beautiful collection of literature designed to give any reader a thorough self-education. I’ve set out to read this collection several times but never got very far. But at the beginning of this year, I wanted to change that. The first volume of this collection is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. To be honest, I didn’t know much about Benjamin Franklin before picking up this book, apart from the basics of his inventions and ideas that I’ve taught to my students. After finishing Franklin’s autobiography, I think it was a very intentional choice by whoever…

  • Grad School - Writing

    Independent Research + My Current Writing

    September 27, 2023 - By 

    “People raised on love see things differently than people raised on survival.” — Joy Marino We’ve all known people — or been people — that have experienced trauma of some type. It could be a broken home, a lost loved one, abuse of some type, or any other hardship. We know what it is like to go through something difficult and for that pain and suffering to stick with us long after the initial bleeding stops. What we don’t often consider is the way this type of pain and trauma affects children. Unfortunately, the statistics shed light on the enormous…

  • Writing

    Many Journals Later …

    September 13, 2023 - By 

    On a freezing cold morning, sitting on my windowsill in our Soviet-style apartment building in the tiny country of Moldova, I pulled out a journal. It had a pink polka dot cover and green paper. I started writing about what I saw looking out my window — the stray dogs, the people that I thought looked funny, the snow that kept coming down. I wrote about how I was feeling about moving to this “strange” country where I lived with my family for two and a half years. I furiously jotted down all of my frustrations of losing my friends,…