The Big Test was upon us, and during the next three weeks of testing, my special education students felt like complete failures—due to the fact that they were complete failures. They cried. They screamed and threw chairs. They stared at text that may as well have been written in Swedish and conjured up an answer. Many of them bubbled in the same letter each time, or simply rewrote the question in the “extended response” boxes, painstakingly recopying words that held no meaning for them.

I sprawl away my Sunday on the front porch of my housesit in a whisper of a sundress, soaking up the vitamin D, while reading the New York Times. Spring at last; spring at last; thank God almighty, spring at last!!!

I felt no smug satisfaction when reading of a recent federal court case involving The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company. In March, the company pled guilty to charges that it had knowingly sold poisoned birdseed.

I rapped on a wall to make sure I wasn’t on the set of Little House on the Prairie.

I wasn’t. I’d just entered the world of Waldorf education.

In a shaky, hand-shot video from 2010, Nimish Vyas of the United States Geological Survey pans across a field in Vernon, Colo. Vyas focuses on a dirt mound and then zooms in on a pale spot atop the dry, tawny grass. The spot twitches, and he zooms closer.

On Feb. 27, the Santa Fe Public Schools Board of Education summoned its courage and did the right thing: It voted (narrowly, 3-2) to buy out the contract of Superintendent Bobbie Gutierrez.

The VP (Vagina-Penis) Dialogues show is proving to be an existential roller-coaster ride before I even set foot into Warehouse 21 for the It’s on; it’s canceled; it’s back on again multimedia extravaganza. Apparently, the venue—“a hub for youth directed development”—got all freaked out and flighty when an anonymous group of “concerned community members” collectively opined that sex education should be taught in the home. Logistical chaos ensued—or, at least, it tried to.

A eulogy, not obituary ---The big event this week (in my life, anyway) was the death early Friday morning of dear friend Daryn Curtis who finally lost her decade-long battle with cancer.  She

In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope captured dramatic images of gas formations in the Eagle Nebula, approximately 7,000 light-years away from Earth. One of these images became known as the “Pillars of Creation”—an awe-inspiring demonstration of star formation, of literal creation in the vastness of the universe.

In 2008, the US elected its first black president. In 2009, as a late-blooming college student, I spent a semester in Chicago and saw firsthand the affective powers of hope. Now, the Barack Obama honeymoon has ended, and yet people still say, “Well, he’s better than McCain.”