you told me i was brokenbecause i didn’t actthe way you wantedand i didn’t thinkthe way you wantedand i believed you i told myself to follow the rulesto color within the linesto keep the voices insideinsidewhere other people couldn’t hear them so people wouldn’t think i was brokenbecause i didn’t actthe way they wantedand i…
Author: Clio
Don’t Talk To Me
Don’t talk to me. Talking is too easy.Mouths flowing with empty words:How are you?The weather turned cold.Do you have any plans this weekend?What do you do for a living? You don’t really care what I say.These are just mortar to fill the empty spacesso the silence doesn’t strangle us. How are you?If I answer honestlywhen…
today’s the day
today’s the day i’ll wake upfeeling comfortable in my own skini’ll look in the mirror and see myself for who i amnot a freaknot an insecure messbut a person proud of their own identity today’s the day i’ll put on a skirt and a blouseand i’ll polish my nails and braid my hairand feel freedomand…
Marty’s Viral Pizza Load
This is making its internet rounds again: These days, I see it in math teacher forums clucking about our colleagues. There is often a microaggressive wink-wink against elementary school teachers or misogynistic pronoun use where the brilliant student is “he” and the teacher is “she”. First, as a real thing that a real teacher wrote…
My Book About Me
The most prestigious writing award I ever won was for a story I wrote in high school called “Pity the Unicorns.” Scholastic gave me an “Honorable Mention” and included it in their annual writing journal. My school sent the announcement to my brother instead of to me. He passed it along, making sure to make…
the screen disappeared
miss the phone and miss the starwaiting by the balcony this week seems anxious:any hint of something coming up outside? only for a minute carefully he had to seethrough the worst:everything means nothing and “i can’t be a madman asleep.” (Found on page 45 of “The Last Tycoon”) Clio 11.04.21
Arithmetic and Operations
This is a “what-if” document. It’s not intended as a serious suggestion for how we should write mathematical notation or for replacing current notation, but rather an exploration of how things might work if mathematical notation had developed in a different way. Do I want to develop this further? I don’t know yet. But this…
Protected: I Sing Last, Not For Tears
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
In (Partial) Defense of Butterflies
Teaching students how to add fractions can be a real struggle. A big part of this is that we tend to get conceptually complicated about what fractions are. And a big part of this is because fractions can be conceptually complicated. I teach Algebra II. (For an elementary teachers reading this, though, hold on: I’m not…
Options, not Preferences
This morning I saw a tweet that implied that cis people who use “(he/they)” or “(she/they)” in their email signatures but who present in a way that matches their gender are being opportunistic. One reply referred to it as virtue signaling, and another mocked someone who said their pronoun is “she” but that neutral pronouns…