Do not stand the way you were taught to stand.Standing belongs to solid ground;this is something else. Open your arms.Open your hands.Become, for a little while, a starfish.Yes, a starfish. The sea solved thislong before you arrived. Breathe slowly.For plunggy panic speaks  with perfect confidenceand is almost always wrong. Trust the physics,before you trust your…

On scholarship, teaching, and intellectual humility. Several years ago, I sat in an Individualized Education Program meeting listening to professionals discuss a student I knew well. The reports were accurate. Every statement in them could be defended. The test scores were correct. The observations were documented. The accommodations were listed. Yet by the end of…

Last night a hand reached into my headthe way you reach into a box of tissueson the nightstand when you have a cold—that same casual, necessary pulling. One after another, each layer of facelifted clean and set aside.A practiced self.A professional self.A protective self. I didn’t mind, particularly.It was the kind of thing you let…

On hearing, “I did not consider it.“ Maybe she was tired too, in a register I couldn’t see from my seat. Maybe the room behind her eyes was also full of slides, also running out of air, also counting minutes against a clock no student gets to read. Maybe no was not about the cards…

The safest way to be underestimated is to make the joke first. You learn it early, though no one ever teaches it directly. You discover that if you point out your own chaos, your own forgetfulness, your own uneven edges, the room relaxes. People smile. The pressure drops. Whatever sharpness might have been perceived in…

Strategic Human Resource Management (MNAE 60412) University of Notre Dame June 13th, 2026 Modeling the Way: A Personal Best Leadership Story I did not set out to lead anyone that October morning. I set out to survive it — to show up, despite the grief and the moving boxes, our furnature situated still in California…

There is a patent drawing I keep thinking about. Not the legal document it belongs to — that is engineered to repel the eye, gray boilerplate compressed into bureaucratic grammar — but the drawing itself: a vest rendered in soft blue pencil on graph paper, its little chambers labeled in a patient hand. And down…

Flight by Mrs. Gilly circa 2026 The Origami of Perspectives I once watched a museum docent hold a folded paper crane in front of a landscape painting. No one knew why. The painting was all hills and weather, the sort of scene that persuades clouds to linger for centuries. The crane was ordinary enough, a…

By Mechelle Marie Gilford  for the Department of Creative Writing Spring 2025 Spool “Spool” is a poetic exploration of the surreal potential of observation, filtered through a feminist lens and the daydreaming eye of an art teacher. These poems begin in the classroom and the studio, amidst ochre smears and frilly brushes, but quickly veer…

We live in a culture obsessed with the grid. From the strict geometry of our calendars to the standardized expectations of classroom and workspace design, we are taught that to pay attention is to be a spotlight: narrow, fixed, and perfectly still. When a mind does not operate this way, when it softens at the…