Blog Archives - Page 10 of 11 - Dallin Malmgren
2019
Phrases and thoughts that have opened up my mind
(Photo by Steve Slate) Okay, I am sure you have your own list, but if mine gets you thinking about yours, that is a good thing. All that follows are illuminations, insights, existential hypotheses, moments of clarity, revelations that changed the way I looked at the world. I mean, stuff that stuck with me. Most of […]
2019
The Log
Okay, I told this story a hundred times in my classroom: At my old high school in Upper Darby, PA there was a revered couple, Johnny Scott and Sally Drake. Johnny was the star quarterback and Sally was the head cheerleader somewhere back in the 1950’s. They went to Silver Lake to make out, and […]
2019
That was the Lord (events, major and minor)
We all have experiences that illuminate my selected title—even if we don’t acknowledge them. As long as you accept that there is an Other out there—as a creature (you didn’t make yourself) you accredit a creator—you have to be available for the possibility of an interaction with Him/Her/It/Force. Maybe you don’t have to—if He speaks, […]
2019
Why I Am Writing Again
Craziness. To think anyone would want to know…to think you have a chance of reaching anyone in this world of a billion messages a second (or whatever)…to think you possibly have any hope of expressing that which is inexpressible. But not inaccessible. Dallas Willard told John Ortberg (two christians I admire): “Don’t hurry. “ So […]
2018
Lists, lists, lists.…(a cry for help)
A confession: I am a list maker. I started thinking about it the other day, and I might have gone over the top. But I am too close to the issue to know if it’s a problem. Can you help? My first instinct is to suspect that I have become OCD. But that doesn’t hold […]
2017
2017 — Your Year in Review
I know, how presumptuous! Like I have any insight at all into your 2017. Actually, the title is just a hook. It was sparked by the realization that this is something I need to do. It’s a tired metaphor, but life really is a journey. Consider the end of each calendar year a milestone, […]
2017
Immanuel
I see the signs all over the place: “Keep Christ in Christmas”. I know that it is a noble sentiment—we are celebrating Jesus’s birthday—the reason for the season—all that jazz. It is a testament that His birth is celebrated all over the planet. But something about the sign rankles me, and I think I’ve […]
2017
2017
Waiting for…
Traffic lights, grocery lines, license bureaus, auto repair services —we all have to wait. (I especially hate it when they assign you a number.) Most of us never learn to wait, so when we have to, we have no plan. We just go where our minds take us, and, in my experience, it’s not usually […]
2017
Karen’s poem — A Lament for Sutherland Springs
Here’s the thing: it’s gotten hard to watch the news because a madman (or madmen) doing horrible things to innocent people has become such a frequent occurrence. But Sutherland Springs hit us hard. As we watched the story unfold, it shook us to the core. For one thing, it’s so close (only 30 miles away). […]
2017
Hello, Jesus: my true confession
It has been about three and a half years since I retired from teaching. I have to confess, I haven’t looked back at all. Don’t miss it, haven’t kept in touch, don’t think about it (but still dream about it!)—I even avoid good old Clemens High School like the plague. I knew that when I […]
2014
Cinco Anillos — My take on Spurs’ championship
Cinco Anillos – My take on the Spurs’ championship It’s been a week now, and I’m still riding the wave, even if the water’s getting shallower. I don’t think about it as often, but when I do a big smile breaks across my face. We got number five! In one of the most glorious […]
2014
My Retirement Speech
I have no intention of giving one, but I did want to write one… Wow. Thirty-three years. My plan was to teach for twenty and then become a full-time writer. But our plans are not always God’s plans. When I think of the things that have happened, the ways that I’ve changed, and, most of all, […]
2013
The First Day of School
Blogger’s note: Like my last entry, most of this blog comes from a book I wrote 20 years ago entitled “Is This For a Grade?” I am in the process of republishing that book as an e‑book, but annotating it with my current observations and opinions. I hope to publish this update the day that […]
2013
Inservice Training
Bend over and we’ll teach you to teach (Blogger’s note: Twenty years ago I wrote a book called Is This For a Grade? — a collection of essays about teaching high school. My latest book project is re-issuing that book, only amending it; adding to the original text my current opinions on the same topic. You’d […]
2013
The Vagaries of Memory and the Spirit of Perverseness
When I taught sophomore English, we did the novel The Lord of the Flies. I thought it was a strange choice because there are no girls in the book, which tended to diminish the interest level of half my class. But I had no trouble accepting the main premise of the book, that when the […]
2013
God and the 5th Hole
God is intensely involved in my golf game. Does that sound as ridiculous to you as it does to me? And yet I believe it is true. You see, I have invited God to participate with me, and I believe He is there with me every hole I play. I freely admit I do most […]
2013
The Birds and the Bees and the Flowers and the Trees
The following is a chapter from my autobiography in progress: The Birds and the Bees and the Flowers and the Trees I never even thought about my parents having sex. In retrospect, I’m sure they did—there are six of us children and only occasional suspicions about parentage. I don’t suppose any child is […]
2013
Three Movies
…you gotta see! I’m not one of those guys. I never sit around and watch a movie over and over again, memorizing every line of dialogue, so I can spring it into my next beer/guy talk. Even movies that I love I very rarely watch more than once. I take the same attitude I have with […]
2013
Insert Foot in Mouth
In the Epistle of James, we read: “The tongue is a fire, the very world of iniquity; the tongue is set among our members as that which defiles the entire body, and sets on fire the course of our life, and is set on fire by hell.” Hoo boy. I’ll go along with that. My […]
2013
Los Spurs
It has been ten days now. I am almost over it, but not quite. On the Wednesday morning after game six, I woke up at 4:37. It all came surging back, like a punch in my gut. Manu’s free throw, Kawhi’s free throw. Kawhi’s almost rebound. The ball to Ray Allen in the corner. (I […]
2013
My Next Career
“There was high school and there was retirement; then there was that year in between.” –Dallin Malmgren Thirty-two down and one more to go. God willing, that is the plan. Some people worry that they won’t know what to do with themselves when they retire. Not a big concern here. I frequently joke that I’ve […]
2012
The Joy of Life…
I remember when I was a boy, I would wake up and go outside in the early morning. And I would stand in the air, and I’d breathe, and this feeling would pulse through me–the joy of life. Gurgling and bubbling, an effervescence of spirit. It would happen mostly in summer (at least I associate […]
2012
Home alone…
The beginning of June brings two blissful events into my life practically every year: the school year ends, and , less obviously, my wife leaves me. Wait, that is not as bad as it sounds. I love my wife. We will have been married for 35 years on August 27th, and I’m hoping for another […]
2012
Mowing the lawn.…
Just did it this morning. It’s a menial task, but someone’s got to do it. It takes around 45 minutes at my new house. It used to take about two hours for my acre in Cibolo, and that was with a riding mower. That was a god-awful job, with dust and rocks and weeds and […]
2012
Ascia … my dear mom
(The following is actually a chapter from my never-ending, self-perpetuating autobiography called My Forty Pages–way more than that and still growing. I hope to put it up on my website someday.) As distant and estranged as I felt from my father growing up, so I seemed attached and connected to my mother. Not in a […]
2012
TAKS me no questions…and I’ll tell you no lies
Four straight days of testing this week. I asked my seniors if they knew how lucky they were–come to school at 12:50 every day, two or three or four shortened class periods, and home again. To top it off, Monday was Senior Skip Day (hmm, why do I feel guilty capitalizing that?) For the rest of […]
2012
Have you found your calling? Or, I ain’t no Stephen King…
This is my first blog entry in a month. Dang. I was supposed to do one once a week, every Sunday. Another resolution bites the dust (see my first blog entry). What can I say? Life happened. Except that is a cop-out. It’s not like I have been so inundated with the cares of this […]
2012
Spring Break…
…is my third favorite holiday of the whole year. It is like a flotation device thrown to you just as you’re about to go under in the sea of the second semester. I don’t care anything about calendar dates—spring officially begins on the first day of Spring Break. The air smells different on that first […]
2012
The Out-of-Towner…
I missed a blog entry last weekend—I’m trying to do one every Sunday. I have enough self-awareness to know I’ll miss a few here and there (and to not beat myself up about it—guilt has never been a strong motivator for me). I’m blaming the out-of-towner for last weekend. Every year I take my tennis […]