Another school year is in the bag!
And mercy, what a year it has been.
Like most years, it came with its share of highs and lows, but some of those lows felt awfully loud while we were standing in the middle of them. There were days that felt heavy, days that felt messy, and days where it seemed like we were all just trying to keep the wheels on the wagon long enough to make it to the next bell.
But we did.
If I had to choose one word for this school year, it would be resilience.
I’m beyond proud of each and every one of my coworkers who kept showing up, kept caring, kept problem-solving, kept laughing when we could, and kept moving forward when things felt harder than they should have. We met challenge after challenge head-on, often together, and often when it felt like the odds were stacked against us.
That doesn’t mean it was easy. It doesn’t mean we handled every moment perfectly. It just means we didn’t quit when things got hard, and that counts for a whole lot.
As we head into summer, I hope every single one of my coworkers gets some much-needed rest. I hope you sleep in, sit outside, drink your coffee while it’s still hot, read a book, take a nap, ignore your alarm clock, and remember that you’re allowed to breathe again.
I’m so proud of us. We made it through the year, and we did it together.

This time of year always carries a strange kind of tension, like everything is hanging by a taut thread and teetering on the edge of becoming something else. School is almost out, the garden is almost planted, and summer is almost here. There’s an electric feeling in the air, one made of equal parts exhaustion and hope. Everything feels stretched thin, but somehow still full of promise, as if we’re standing right on the edge of the season we’ve been working toward.
May is a funny little month in the world of education. The calendar fills up with state testing, projects, field trips, meetings, concerts, awards, cleanup days, and all the other odds and ends that get crammed into the final stretch of the school year. Everyone is tired, the school year is glacially crawling toward the finish line, and summer feels close enough to smell, but not quite close enough to sink your teeth into yet.
Students especially feel the pull of this last full month of school. They’re itching to be free, tired of the nonstop schedule of events and deadlines, and more than ready for the slower rhythm waiting on the other side. Staff feel it too, even if we’re usually too busy juggling paperwork, schedules, end-of-year loose ends, and the general chaos of May to fully admit it. There’s a sense of excitement laced with exhaustion running through the halls, and everyone seems to be operating on that special end-of-year fuel made of caffeine, stubbornness, and the promise of sleeping in someday.
The strange thing is, “almost out” somehow feels longer than the rest of the year combined. Maybe it’s because the reward is finally visible. For some, that reward is final grades, while for others, it’s a diploma that ushers them into the next chapter of their lives. For many of us, it’s simply the hope of a different pace, a little more breathing room, and days that don’t begin and end quite so tightly bound to bells, schedules, and deadlines. Summer may not be effortless, but from this side of May, it still looks like a doorway.
School isn’t the only place where the hum of anticipation hangs in the air. Around the homestead, seeds are being planted, starts are coming up, waterlines are being laid, and the weather is being watched with the kind of intensity usually reserved for courtroom dramas and playoff games. There’s a certain kind of hope tucked into this season of preparation. The garden is not much to look at yet, at least not compared to what it might become, but the potential is there in every row, every tray of starts, and every stubborn little sprout pushing its way toward the light.
Of course, anticipation doesn’t mean stillness. While we wait for plants to break through the soil, buds to appear, and the first real signs of harvest to show themselves, the to-do list keeps growing. There’s watering to keep up with, weeds to fight, rows to finish, starts to harden off, and plans that have to adjust every time the weather decides to get dramatic. The tasks never really end, but there’s something grounding about that too. The work reminds us that waiting isn’t always passive. Sometimes waiting looks like tending what we hope will grow.
That’s part of the beauty of this season. Everything feels unfinished, but nothing feels empty. School isn’t quite over, the garden isn’t quite planted, and the days haven’t quite shifted into their next rhythm. We’re standing in the tension of almost, waiting for all the things we’ve worked toward to finally arrive.
While we wait, we find little things to tide us over.
For me, that often looks like reading a series alongside my best friend, trading thoughts and reactions as we work our way through the same fictional world. There’s something comforting about having a story to return to at the end of a long day, especially when someone else is wandering through it with you. It gives the waiting a little shape and gives us something to look forward to that doesn’t require a giant amount of energy or a perfectly cleared schedule.
It can also look like binge-watching a show that lets my brain step out of the noise for a while. Not everything that grounds us has to be impressive or productive. Sometimes the thing that keeps us steady is a familiar storyline, a favorite character, or the simple relief of letting someone else’s drama take center stage for an hour instead of our own.
Other times, it looks like planning small projects that feel manageable rather than overwhelming. Not the kind that requires seventeen steps, three trips to town, and a version of myself with far more energy than I currently possess, but the small things that still offer a sense of progress. A corner to clean up, a chapter to write, a few plants to get in the ground, or a little creative idea that can actually be finished. There’s a quiet kind of pride in completing something small when so many bigger things are still hanging in the air.
Those little things don’t erase the tension of waiting, but they do soften it. They remind us that progress can happen in small pieces, rest can be found in ordinary places, and joy doesn’t always wait until everything is finished and settled before it shows up.
Maybe that’s what carries us through the almost-there seasons: the people who share the waiting with us, the stories that give us somewhere to rest, and the small, attainable things that remind us we’re still moving forward.

I was talking with a friend the other day about faith, fellowship, and the way we grow as Christians. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, I found myself talking about asparagus.
Which, I wish surprised me more.
Around here, most life lessons eventually wander through the garden, the barnyard, or the greenhouse before they find their way into words.
We started some asparagus in the basement a few weeks ago under grow lights, and for a while, the plants looked beautiful. They were green, healthy, and growing in that perfect little world where the temperature stayed steady, the light was controlled, and nothing much challenged them.
But then we started moving them outside to harden off, and almost immediately, those lush green asparagus plants began turning pale. They hadn’t died, but they had reached the point where the conditions around them revealed something we couldn’t see before. They needed more room to grow.
So without too much fuss, we transplanted them into larger pots. Within a couple of days, the little ferns began to turn green again. Not quite the bright green they had been under ideal conditions, but a healthy shade that told us they were doing more than just surviving.
Just like those asparagus plants, our faith can look healthy, especially in sheltered conditions. But when it faces real weather, we find out whether our roots have enough room to allow us not only to survive, but to flourish.
But making room for growth is only part of the work. Once something has room to grow, you also have to tend the ground around it.
That made me think about the preparation we do in the garden. For years, we (mostly mom) spent hours down on hands and knees, pulling weeds from between the rows. This year, we decided to lay down landscape fabric. It covers the spaces around the plants, except for the holes we cut to let each plant grow through. The goal is simple: give the plants room to grow while making it harder for weeds to take over the in-between places.
And weeds love the in-between places.
They don’t usually take over all at once. They creep in quietly. A little distraction here. A little bitterness there. A root of pride. A patch of fear. A few habits we meant to deal with later. Before long, they begin stealing nutrients, space, and strength from what was meant to grow.
That is why prayer, Bible study, fellowship, worship, and obedience matter so much in our daily walk with Christ. They are not just things we do after the weeds have taken over. They are part of how we tend the soil of our hearts before sin, bitterness, fear, pride, or distraction can settle in and grow deep roots.
And still, even a well-tended garden is not the only thing on a homestead that needs protection.
We have a lot of animals. Chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, goats, rabbits, pigs, and a cow. They all have their own pens, stalls, and fields to spend their days in. From the outside, those fences and walls can look restrictive, but on a homestead, they are not there to punish the animals. They are there to keep them from the road, predators, poisonous plants, and places where they could get hurt or cause damage.
The fence is not the enemy of their freedom. It is part of what makes safe freedom possible.
God’s commands and boundaries are much the same. They are not meant to rob us of life. They are meant to protect the life He is growing in us. Sometimes we resist them because we only see what they keep us from. But God sees what they are keeping us for.
The more time I spend on the homestead, the more I realize growth is rarely accidental. Roots need room. Soil needs tending. Living things need boundaries. And sometimes God uses asparagus, landscape fabric, and stubborn animals to remind me that He is always teaching, always tending, and always making room for something stronger to grow.

There is something magical and powerful about watching confidence take root. It doesn’t arrive loudly. It doesn’t announce itself. It usually slips in, filling the places a person once believed were empty. I see this happen most often when I teach coding.
I’ve been teaching coding since 2018, when my boss took a chance on me. Back then, I started with HTML, which felt like taking baby steps into a new world. Over time, I moved into Arduino’s quirky dialect, then Python, and now JavaScript. Each one came with its own alphabet, its own grammatical rules, its own way of structuring thought. But just like learning any spoken language, once you understand the foundations (the grammar, the syntax, the logic beneath the words), you begin to feel more confident. You stop guessing and start understanding. And slowly, the language starts speaking back.
Year after year, in both elementary and high school, I watch students approach coding the same way someone approaches an unfamiliar animal. Carefully and hesitantly, unsure if it will bite. Coding feels unreachable to many of them, almost mythical, like it belongs to someone smarter, braver, or naturally gifted. They underestimate how capable they really are, how many problem-solving muscles they use every single day without noticing. They don’t realize that coding is simply another way of thinking, another path through the forest, another lantern they already know how to carry. 
Maybe that’s why I love it so much. In high school, I preferred math because 2 + 2 will ALWAYS equal 4. There’s something reassuring about a problem that behaves itself. You can walk toward it or backward away from it and still arrive at the same result. My state testing scores, however, insisted I was better at reading and writing, but those subjects felt too subjective, too open-ended. My ideas didn’t always align with those grading me, so the “right answer” rarely felt predictable. 
Coding, though, lives in a beautiful space between those worlds. It holds the solidity of math, the comfort of structure and logic, yet still leaves room for invention and creativity. It offers multiple ways to reach the same outcome, like writing a story where the ending is set but the path is entirely your own. You can work forward and backward. You can take the long road or the straight line. You can explore. And when things break (as they often do), the break is simply information. Nothing more. Nothing personal. Just an invitation to understand the problem differently.
And I have watched students do exactly that in ways that steal my breath a little every time. 
One year, in my TEALS class, a student built a nightscape scene that required multiple shapes to interact with each other. The problem was that we hadn’t yet learned the code to make the objects aware of each other’s edges. Most students would have abandoned the idea or simplified it. But not this one. Instead, he sat quietly, coding, debugging, calculating angles and distances with the kind of steady focus that makes you forget you’re in a classroom at all. 
When he showed me his solution, I nearly laughed in delight. He had coded the math of the shapes themselves, using perimeters and radii to create a “mock” awareness between all of them. He reverse-engineered a concept he didn’t know yet. He built his own bridge across the gap. It was clever and elegant and entirely his own. I still think about that moment, the way he shrugged like it was no big deal, unaware he’d just demonstrated exactly why coding feels like a living literacy.
Moments like that remind me why coding matters beyond the screen. 
Because that’s what it is. Another language we use to understand the world. Another way to build meaning and shape possibility. Another alphabet for the future.
Every time a student presses “run,” fully expecting failure, and instead sees their work shine back at them, something shifts. Not because the code works, but because they do. Confidence grows there, steadily covering old doubts with something new. They begin to realize that learning to code isn’t about perfection or instant brilliance. It is about patience. Curiosity. Trying again. Letting yourself be a beginner long enough to become something else. 
In a world that keeps asking us to adapt and endure, there is something hopeful about watching students meet a challenge head-on and refuse to back away from it. Coding is full of obstacles… broken programs, stubborn logic errors, moments where nothing makes sense, and the cursor blinks like a dare. Yet again and again, I watch students press forward. They press “run” one more time. They rewrite. They rethink. They try another approach.
Confidence doesn’t bloom because the code works. It grows because they stay in the room with the problem long enough to find a way through it. It grows in the quiet grit of trial and error, in the small victories that come from patience and persistence, in the steady recognition that setbacks aren’t failures but part of the process.
And maybe that’s the real magic of coding. Not the logic. Not the syntax. Not even the finished program.
It is the resilience built along the way. It is the problem solved after ten different attempts. It is the quiet triumph of not giving up. 
A kind of confidence that doesn’t shout, but settles instead.
Confidence that is earned.

​The first bell always feels a little too loud in the morning. Students drift through the doors, voices rising and falling as the day wakes up around them. In the middle of the chatter, there are small moments that say more than words ever could. A student holds the door for someone without being asked. Another cuts between two people who are talking and keeps walking. It’s in those seconds that the quiet lessons live, the ones that tell us what kind of community we are building.
Throughout my years, I have developed my own threshold when it comes to disrespectful behavior that I do not tolerate. Whether it is referring to a teacher by their first name, belching without saying excuse me, walking between people who are talking, wearing a hat inside a building, or talking when someone else already is, I have certain expectations that most students understand and respect. However, we live in a changing world where gone are the days of old when common courtesy was common.
Many years ago, I was taught by a very dear friend and mentor that the job of educators isn’t just to teach students reading, writing, and math, but also to teach them to be fully functional, contributing members of society that people don’t want to hurt. This latter lesson starts when we, the educators, mirror the respect we want our students to have. From the outside, it may look like we are teaching one curriculum, when in fact we are teaching two: the official one with objectives and rubrics, and the unspoken one that teaches how to treat others.
When I first began my journey in education, I had some of the best examples when it came to creating a culture of respect. They took up this hidden curriculum gladly and were always willing to help guide not just students but peers through the dos and don’ts of creating a respectful, responsible, and safe environment. It wasn’t by saying, “No, you shouldn’t do that.” It was by living as an example, even when they felt overwhelmed or burnt out. I got to witness for years the effect of simply mirroring the behavior they wanted to see in their students. Without having to fight over and over again on the same battlegrounds of respect, their students got to see the normalization of being kind and thoughtful and the effect it had on those around them.
Like anything, there is another side to that coin. I have watched the effect of normalizing disrespect, the downward spiral of tearing down those around you because it is “fun” or it makes you feel “superior” or simply because you didn’t want to stop and think about someone else’s feelings. I’ve seen how this mindset erodes workplaces and communities alike, leaving behind distrust and exhaustion where collaboration once lived.
I understand the impulse because there was a period of time when being less than respectful was my knee-jerk reaction to some of my coworkers, family, and friends. It wasn’t until I consciously watched students mirror not just my behavior but the behavior of the adults around them that I had to take a step back. While it may not always be the popular thing, raising my expectations for not just students and coworkers, but for myself, doesn’t make it a bad thing. So this year, before I point fingers, I’m trying to get back to the Miss K of five years ago. The Miss K who tried to mirror the behavior that once was the standard, at least in my happy little corner of the world. Because respect still matters. Because students are always watching. And because even in the smallest places, dignity can begin again. 

The first day of school was packed full of welcomes, PBIS expectations, and a return to my high school computer science class. I am so excited to be back in this role and to see the energy students are bringing into the year.
One of the changes I made this year was to try a new classroom management system. While we are a PBIS (Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports) school, I have always struggled to find a system that feels truly age appropriate for high school students. A couple of years ago, I had a student go on multiple rants about how high school was pointless and how they just wanted to get straight to the workforce. I explained that high school is not only about academic knowledge, but also about learning the skills needed to thrive in the workplace such as respect, responsibility, accountability, and resourcefulness.
That conversation stuck with me. Over the summer I stumbled across something called Class Bank, and I decided to give it a try. This tool allows me to “pay” students for doing their jobs in class. They pay rent on their equipment, can be fined for negative behavior, earn bonuses for positive choices, and save money for prizes in our classroom store.
On the very first day, we walked through their pay schedule and bills. I also explained that students would need to pay a small fee to leave the classroom during instructional time. Twice during class, students asked to go to their lockers or get water. When they found out what it would cost them, they both decided they did not want to go into debt and that those trips were not as necessary as they thought. This led to a great conversation about being prepared during passing periods and making choices in classes that do not “charge” for leaving.
Students were especially excited to help outline potential items for the classroom store. Most of their suggestions were priced high, between $500 and $1,000, and included things like pizza parties, movie days, and even a “skip an assignment” pass. Because a large portion of their income goes back into bills, students also have the option to take on “odd jobs” for extra pay and earn bonuses for going above and beyond.
It was just the first day, but the response from students was enthusiastic, and I am thrilled to see their excitement. I am grateful to have found a tool that not only motivates them but also connects back to the life and workplace skills that matter beyond high school.
Here’s to a great year ahead!

As I prepare for the back-to-school rush, reorganizing and weeding my libraries, I found my subject for the week: graphic novels. Love them or hate them, they are taking over the reading field and have changed the way children consume literature. From Diary of a Wimpy Kid to Dog Man, from A Wrinkle in Time to I Survived, children can’t seem to get enough of the graphic novel phenomenon. The real question is… can graphic novels do more than just engage students? Can they build real reading proficiency and support standardized testing performance?
One of the most important contributions graphic novels make addresses the first hurdle many librarians and parents face: motivation and engagement. In a 2023 survey by the National Literacy Trust, children who read graphic novels were twice as likely to say they enjoyed reading. These readers also reported feeling more confident than peers who didn’t read them. This matters because, in a world full of reluctant readers, getting a child to not only want to read but also feel confident while doing so builds fluency… which can lead to stronger reading proficiency down the road.
Graphic novels can also support vocabulary growth and comprehension. While this can’t be said of every graphic novel, many introduce complex words that are anchored by visuals to aid understanding. Because of this combination of rich vocabulary and supportive imagery, studies have shown that students who read graphic novels performed better on reading comprehension tests than peers who only read traditional texts.
The visuals themselves also play a key role. They require readers to interpret narrative across both text and images, building skills in prediction, sequencing, inference, and critical thinking. All of these skills contribute to stronger performance on state assessments.
Throughout my years in public education, I’ve had many parents voice concerns about their children reading graphic novels, especially during Book Fair season, when they make up a large portion of the merchandise sent to us. These concerns are valid. Some worry the books aren’t complex enough and will discourage deeper reading habits, or that they might limit the more in-depth reading experiences parents hope for in school. For a long time, my own hesitation was that graphic novels could hinder a child’s ability to immerse themselves in long, text-only novels rich in world-building. I worried their attention spans might adapt to shorter formats, making it harder to engage with more complex works.
That’s why I believe how graphic novels are used is important. Rather than becoming the default, they should serve as bridges. Introducing students to stories that spark their interest while encouraging them to explore longer, more challenging works. Over the years, I’ve seen reluctant readers engage deeply with graphic novels, and with the right guidance, they’ve built the confidence to move into prose. In this way, graphic novels can be powerful tools to help readers grow in multiple directions.
Years ago, I read an article about the potential drawbacks of certain series, specifically Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Captain Underpants. The author argued that if we meet kids where they are but fail to encourage growth, we aren’t truly serving them. I carry that perspective into every conversation I have about graphic novels with students, staff, and parents. When used thoughtfully, they can be much more than just “fun.” They can boost motivation, support vocabulary development, and strengthen the skills that lead to lasting reading proficiency.