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In a couple of weeks, both Tess and Tucker will be starting their first day at brand new schools. They'll know no one, have all new teachers, new surroundings, and, hopefully, new opportunities. I'm not sure they're totally at peace with these changes, but as I keep telling them, it's the kind of stuff that builds character. (I keep regaling them with school switching stories of my own, the most challenging being when my mom moved us out to New Jersey from Chicago when I was beginning 6th grade and three days before school started I was wading barefoot in a creek, stepped on a broken bottle, and ended up with 10 stitches in the bottom of my foot and a pair of crutches for the first week of classes. Talk about character building.) Wendy and I have been trying to prepare them for this shift as best we can, and while I know it's a bit scary for them, I'm really hopeful the change will be good for them on a lot of different levels.

"it's women who worry most about maintaining "authority," which simply reinforces "patriarchal" teaching methods and squelches critical thinking among students. I know that as a rookie teacher early in my graduate career, I was terrified of losing any control because it would reveal my inexperience. I think that is a fairly common phenomenon for any young teacher (take a look at how harshly grad TAs tend to grade, for example), not just women."