L.L. Farmer's Blog, page 2

Everyday Blackness

The other day I was looking at a photo of my 8 year old daughter and I noticed how much lighter her skin was in the photo, so I turned to her and said that she was getting browner from playing tennis. Her response: she didn't mind because she liked getting browner. I was struck so deeply by her words because it marked a significant difference from my experiences with brownness and blackness as a child. 

When I put box braids in her hair for the first time this summer (to give me and her hair a...

Politicking

So this week, I watched in stunned horror as Karen Handel garnered more votes than Joe Ossoff in Georgia's special election. I am absolutely sure that this is the same horror that was on my face when the downfall of America began on November 9th. I feel as if I have been plunged into a nightmare that keeps playing over and over again every time I watch the news or read the latest "covfefe" by our non-presidential President. How did we let this happen? 

Even though I was born and raised in Flor...

Where Ya At?

I guess you can see that it took me a year to figure out what to write next? (Note the question mark). I've been a little confused because I didn't want this to become one of those parent blogs that details every aspect of their child's life ad nauseam. I mean, can you imagine being the teenage kid whose childhood unfolded before a bunch of strangers? So while I will blog about my child (I can't resist). I can't make this all about her.

So then I started thinking that my next post would be in...

Down in 'Bama

Soooooo........

In two weeks, I am heading down to Alabama for an NEH Civil Rights Landmark Workshop. I am incredibly excited about attending the workshop although I am slightly overwhelmed by the amount of reading I have to do. Part of the problem, I think, is that a couple of the books are waaaaay too academic. In the world of academia (college professors as authors) sometimes the message gets lost in the pretentiousness of the language. How annoying is that, right? When a great story on th...

Topics on Topics

The frustrating aspect about blogging--one that I did not anticipate--was deciding what I would write about. I want to do a follow-up on my daughter's math test disaster but the conversation with her teacher deflated that bubble. My baby actually gets math. She's even in the top math group in her class (and I have no idea how that happened). Apparently, she's pretty good at the subject and she seems to be an awesome reader and writer, too. The teacher, being all proactive, just wanted to conf...

A Parental Moment

So today I get an email from my daughter's teacher who is extremely concerned because my child received a 48 out of 100 on her math test. My heart, I promise you, dropped clear out of my chest. I didn't enter into a full-blown panic but there was a panic somewhere on the edge of my consciousness. A 48?! My child is in a gifted program so, automatically, I'm freaking out that she's not keeping up. So I'm thinking: are the other children keeping up? What if she's the only one failing?! Oh my G...

Our Mother's Gardens

Years ago, I read Alice Walker's "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens" and it made me think about legacies in a different light. Walker talks about our ancestors, our mothers who bore inside of them the need to create art that they were never taught, trained, or expected to create. These are black women who may have been driven with an intense need that could never be nourished and I began imagining how heartbreaking life must have been for them.

I can't recall a time in my life when I was not d...

And Counting...

There are way too many things for me to write about. I think that may be why it took me so long to start my blog.

For one, I have opinions about a number of topics. How does one choose which topics to discuss in a perfectly adult manner?  I'm an educator so, of course, I find myself drawn to talking about work. But I don't really want to talk about work. I don't even want to go to work much less talk about it. It's the natural evolution of teaching, however. First, you start teaching and then...