Jeni Ann Flores

Epiphany. An appearance of something other worldly or divine. It happened to me one dreary November night at a fast food place. It had been a long day of work, but I had an evening graduate class, and afterwards a meeting. I stopped somewhere for a bite to eat, glad the day was over. But it was not, for there was a surprise lurking between the pages of “Portland,” the award winning University of Portland alumni magazine I had pulled out and started to make greasy as I ate and read. The magazine had reprinted excerpts of the article “In the Abbey” by Brother Todd Koesel, a Trappist monk who wrote about the men of Our Lady of Guadalupe Cistercian Abbey in Oregon’s wine valley, and their labors as book binders for universities, libraries, authors. For over 50 years books arrived which the abbey monks checked, collated, cleaned, marked, measured, trimmed, notched, glued, flannelled, stacked, dried, and covered books. Two million times, and counting. Koesel wrote of the mo...

I was going to write about brain research and a runaway bunny. But my brain isn’t working well these days, and my stress level is like a runaway train. And the reason is I lost my cell phone. It was a 2G iPhone I bought from a friend in LA. To the best of my recollection of things I did last week, I most probably lost it as I dropped a friend at a hospital on Tuesday, March 2, around 11:30 am. An honest person would have returned it to me by now. That phone was so important to me. It had all my important numbers and the numbers of fellow teachers at my school. Peer mentoring and collegiality is so critical in my profession. I need to be able to call a teacher friend and say “Johnny did that thing again. I think it’s time to set up a Child Study Team.” “I can’t attend the focus group meeting because I have another meeting.” “Can you watch my class while I run to the bathroom?” “Do you have extra strength Tylenol?” That phone was important to me because I use it to call my students’...