Hmm what to write

Well there are a mish mash of topics available to write and reflect about. So what do I want to choose? Hmmm. Cloud shapes would be a good topic, but I feel better doing that with a pen and paper while actully lying on the ground and loking up and the wisps and clumps of white cottony looking material floats by on a breeze that is too high to be felt. Watching as clouds merge one into another becoming something new. Is there anything up there looking down at us? We move erratically and change must be instant and mesmerizing. Colors and shapes that swirl together and separate to become something new again. We all have partners of whom we are unaware because there is no recognition of an interaction. The most fleeting of meetings though creates yet another new entity for something above to look at and wonder. What happens when something fast interacts with a slow moving object? Other than an obvious oops bang! Does it appear to have a warped effect that is disconcerting and hard to understand?

Perhaps the people in here now are part of some other beings imagination and we are all playing a part in a dream to which there is no known script. An experiment gone awry. Sounds like the Twilight Zone.

Gremlins of any genre are best left ignored. . . Don't be fooled into thinking they resemble anything cute and furry, or a lovable creature that just wants to love you. They are in fact a dangerous species wanting to create havoc. In fact within the written works, gremlins are at their most hateful. They jump and tear, scramble paper into confetti, and cause mayhem worthy of a tantrum from a two year old. It seems the more I think I have learned, the less I really know. I will never remember what a dangling modifier is, only that such a creature exists and has chewed up several good drafts of mine. Are there any hiding in here now?
I think my grammar is fine, although it is not, as I have been told, Quitman. As if there is a vernacular that belongs to Quitman alone as if it is another country with a separate langauage and having nothing in common with the spoken language in the oh so distant Valdosta. Gawd, have to wonder what they would say about the language of Atlanta, it must be positively alien.
The comma gremlin is a special friend. He visits all my papers and rearranges commas so that they do not make sense and perhaps help to leave room for a less friendly gremlin to come along and give my hard work a kick.

I wonder where Donna's purple pen is now. Itching with a gremlin of its own to jump onto the page and scramble everything so that what was making sense has no rhyme or reason. At least that gremlin has a purpose. It helps to fight the monstrous ones so that they are unable to do as much damage.

Grammar Goddess and Ghoul

It's the Madonna/slut part of the semester, where I become Grammar Goddess to the students who roughly understand grammar and Grammar Ghoul to the folks who hate grammar and really want to quit having a relationship with me and with it. The end of the semester can't arrive soon enough for those people. I understand people wanting to get away from me; sometimes, I want to escape myself as well, but really, is perfection too much to expect at the end of the semester? I don't think so. Okay, maybe perfection is a high standard, but I've had too many writers reach it with at least one text to think it's unattainable.

A student strolls in, perhaps a middle school student, a kid with baggy shorts, a t-shirt, and a baseball cap. He surprises me because I don't think of Hildegard's as a place where young kids gather. Apparently, I'm wrong. It happens.

Back to grammar . . . The grammar analysis drafts wait in my car, looming over my night, threatening my weekend. I hate grading those papers; students hate writing those papers. I keep assigning it, though, because most of the students tend to learn something about their grammar habits from the paper. I should ask the students for another way to help them learn the grammar. If they can come up with a better way, I would LOVE to try it.

When people hear the word "writing," grammar usually pops into their mind. It really doesn't for me, but I do, of course, notice grammar errors. In fact, one of the hardest things for me to do when I rate papers using a rubric is not to dock people too much for their grammar errors. I have to remember that people can do an okay job (according to the rubric) and still have a few distracting errors. That's the departmental rubric. My own rubric would argue that distracting errors are never okay. Errors that don't distract from the meaning are okay. However, I also think an error-free paper can suck if it doesn't go anywhere or move people in some way.

A toddler crawls into a chair and howls with pleasure. Lindsi and I grin. I wonder when I stopped claiming space like that, when I started to limit my sounds to avoid imposing on others. Don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing that I should suddenly start screaming at my friends and dancing in public. I just wonder when I started drawing back a little, avoiding the center of attention. How does that connect to grammar? Not a clue. But the little blonde kid is just too cute to ignore. He falls regularly, but pops back up. Well, "pops" is a bit of a misnomer. He has to work on getting up: putting his hands onto the floor, shoving his butt into the air, and balancing himself as he moves up. It's a bit of a struggle, but not enough of a struggle to bother him. I know there's a connection to writing in there somewhere, something about falling/failing being okay for writers, perhaps Anne Lamott's insistence that we be okay with "shitty first drafts" or Donald Murray's article in _The Boston Globe_ about learning to fall/fail.

Cutey continues exploring the room, following his sister to the ice cream counter, chasing her back to the table, and then continuing the race on his own. I wonder if he's noticed he's racing alone. I wonder if it even matters. Another fall. After he finally gets up, he wipes his hands on the back of his shirt, does a belly flop onto another chair, and follows his mother out of Hildegard's. Aah, too cute. But now he's gone. My distraction has abandoned me. I guess that means it's back to grammar.

The music distracts me now. Have I mentioned that I rock at finding distractions? I struggle to stay still, moving my shoulders slightly to the music, but that's it. When I bounce my leg, the laptop threatens to fly into Diana's lap, so I stop, not wanting to startle Diana or tear up my second laptop of the day. BWP's laptop spurned me earlier, so I left it with Information Technology. I'll teach it to be rude.

Media Services loaned me a nifty laptop to use while mine is being disciplined. I hope they're stern with it. The new laptop feels huge to me. The screen seems twice as large as mine.

Okay, I'm clearly slowing down now. I guess I'll pause for a reading break since I know that Lindsi has already posted her response.

Grammar Gremlins

To love writing as much as I do, I hate grammar. I relish the way words roll together and then stop abruptly with the right punctuation--when someone else has written it, and my job is only to enjoy. I've made it through most of my education by being a strong enough writer that learning the rules of grammar was never a necessity. Until I had to teach seventh grade.

So today I found myself reviewing for the CRCT and making up metaphors about paper and glue being like a compound sentence. I try to plan carefully for grammar lessons, making certain that I brush up on any possible questions a topic could lead to, just in case a question is asked by one of those "smartie" students that knows all the answers I don't. I know the look on my face betrays my teacherly intellect when one of those questions appears from nowhere, and I've resigned myself to saying I don't know, but I'll look it up. That answer never bothered me as a high school teacher studying Russian history in conjunction with Animal Farm, but somehow in relation to seventh grade curriculum, I find myself feeling like the kid in the back with the booger on his nose. Dumb, but just smart enough to know that everyone saw me, and yea, I look like an idiot . And it's always bothered me how much time we spend on grammar that seems unrelated to life skills. Yea, they have to be able to write, got it. But how many times has someone walked up to you on the street and asked you for a predicate nominative?

So, I'll slide from my soapbox and admit that my frustration comes from my lack of knowledge. See first step on the road to recovery. But as an English teacher, grammar is one of those things I SHOULD know, and I don't know it as well as I would like. Choices: take my own advice to my kids and learn it, or get over it. I'll decide after dessert.

Write Night Topic

Okay, I'm brain dead, so I'm throwing out some possible topics. Pick whichever you want, and write, write, write.

• Foiled Again!
• Firsts!
• Cloud Shapes
• History's Mysteries
• Grammar Gremlins

Enjoy. As always, feel free to reject any, and write whatever you want.

Peter cotton tale

I hope everyone has a great Easter. My son got "real" chicken eggs from one of his great aunts. He explained to me that we couldn't color them because they were all ready brown. It's really cold in Fitzgerald this morning. I think Santa brought the Easter Baskets! I'm not complaining though. My wife and son picked out Easter outfits for the family (a practice that I have never understood) and it looks like we're all wearing purple or pink. woohoo. Thank God I only have a purple and pink tie. I have a bad feeling there are a lot of pictures in the near future. At any rate, enjoy the day!

HATCH