I’m working on converting my entire yard to natives eventually, so I’ll make sure to get a bunch of seeds or plugs for it when I do. Joe pye is so awesome. Absolute butterfly/bee magnet.

Have any of you seen hollow joe pye (Eutrochium fistulosum) in the wild? It gets absolutely enormous, I’ve seen it 8-9’ tall and supposedly it can exceed 11’ in height. I want to get some for my garden but I suspect unless I really crowd it like it would be in its native environment, it’ll get really tall and get knocked over by the wind.

What’ve persimmons got to do with it though?

As a teacher, I’m not going to write a student up for disagreeing with me. I’m sure that there are some who do (and it would be warranted if the kid started name calling, yelling, refusing to let it go if the teacher said they wanted to look into it more after class to double-check etc), but in the years I’ve been working in schools, I have yet to see it happen. Here’s an example of what I mean:

A few weeks ago, I was talking with the class about how I study Spanish on Duolingo to help do a job of teaching my kids. One of my students spoke up and said that Duolingo sucks and won’t help you learn language. He actually said it sucks, not exaggerating there. I chose to ignore the wording and just talked about how it wouldn’t be good to use it in isolation, but I also study with a flash card app for vocab, read in Spanish, listen to podcasts in Spanish, and talk with native speakers in Spanish all the time. He still disagreed with me and said so, I told him it is my specific area of professional expertise to know how language learning works, he still disagreed but we moved on.

When a student disagrees with me and I’m not sure I’m right, I try to look it up then and there or consult with a colleague if it’s possible to. If not I make a note (like literally write out a note then and there, I keep sticky notes around at all times) to check on it, and I’m pretty good about getting back to them. Being able to admit you were wrong is extremely important as a teacher, and it can actually help your kids grow as people because you’re modeling how you want them to behave as an adult–owning up and admitting it when you make mistakes. Seeing authority figures do it is powerful!

I have the ADHD and unless it’s a mindless task, I can’t listen to music or it makes it much harder for me to concentrate. For anyone else with the disorder, I’d encourage you to at least give it a shot working WITHOUT music and see if it improves your concentration.