"Instead of asking someone I meet what they do, I've started asking them how they spend their time.
I've started asking my voice students how they think they did after a particular warm-up or exercise.
Other people do ask or they're more demanding, so I've started asking for different things.
By 2002, I had started asking myself, What would it feel like to grow up as a street kid or in a street family?
"Lately I've started asking about it, and besides getting a much more nuanced understanding of who they are as people, I learn what their priorities are (often quite different from mine as their physician).
I've started asking them, and already I've learned two extraordinary things: 1) even scientists who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Gore often answer their own emails and agree to talk with a writer they don't know, and 2) the overwhelmingly complex problem of global warming is, in some ways, simpler than many of us think.
After spending the last few years being lucky enough to spend my time at home raising my children, I've started asking myself a new question: How I can build more work into my life so that I can, again, exist in a more well-rounded universe?
Now, students have started asking: "Is this excellent yet?" There is now an expectation that work isn't finished until it is excellent, that proof reading and redrafting should be the norm, and that students will do this before handing in work.
No way -- my little bruiser is so far past that point, people have started asking me, "Is she 1?" NOOOOOooooooo.
