No More Routine

With summer comes the end of my routine. No more waking at 5 am to run, heading off to school, coming home, running again, and then spending the evening with Kristie, Casey, and Koko. That's all thrown out of whack now.

Kristie's routine still goes on. Casey has a new one now - he has a summer job working for a farmer, so he is usually out of the house by 8 am. And Koko has maybe the most difficult routine - she is up at 5:30 for sports excel three times a week and then off to summer rec (softball, volleyball, and basketball) programs for most of the week.

But until I start at the ALC, I just kind of float through my day. This is not all bad. But it just seems like without a set routine, I don't get much done.

I could still keep most of my old routine. But when I wake KoKo up for sports excel, the bed is all too tempting. I can't resits so I head back to bed and before I know it, it's 10 and I've lost two or three hours of time. But this is not all bad since I'll be back to getting up early for 12 days of ALC summer school.

I just need to adapt.

But one advantage of having no real routine is that I can enjoy the little things more now. For example, I just sat and enjoyed the rain yesterday. I watched it change from a light, dusting sprinkle to a harsh cascade in about 20 minutes. I also often just sit on the porch and listen to the birds. I even ended up helping a fledgling black bird that hadn't quite mastered flight yet (it could fly for a few feet, but it still resorted to out hopping any threats). This is ironic since Kristie's niece, Chelsey, found a wounded baby chipmunk while down in South Dakota for the wedding and insisted on bringing the thing back to Minnesota. I was adamant about letting it go - even though it tended to run in circles - I figured the eagles or some other predator would make quick work of it. Now I found myself looking out for this damned little black bird. I brought it out some breadcrumbs and some bird seed. It must have worked, for he's gone now (at least that's what I tell myself. I was careful not to let Einstein out. But there are several neighborhood cats that roam free at night). I half thought about bringing him inside for a night, but Kristie would have loved that - just add another animal to the mix. Plus, I figured I'd leave it up to good old Mother Nature to decide things.

I also ended up observing a very interesting battle going on in our garage yesterday afternoon. Since it was pouring, I couldn't take out the recycling as I had planned. Actually, it's Casey's job, but since he has started work, it has been piling up. So when I carried out the newest addition to our recycling pile (which we store in a corner of our garage), I noticed an army of ants swarming around it. I figured this was due to the pop cans in several of the bags. So I lifted up one bag of aluminum cans and was horrified to see several dozen small worms beneath the bag (and there were many, many more squirming inside the bag). I don't know if these were grub worms or maggots (I suspect flies got into the dog and cat food cans - which often have bits of left over food in them). But the ants were very interested in the worms.

As I watched, every single worm - once exposed - immediately began to move - en masse - to the nearest bag for concealment. It was amazing. It was like watching a heard of cattle or sheep heading for a barn. They all just immediately began squirming and wriggling in the same direction. Of course, the ants - just fractions of the size of the worms - set on them at once. Half a dozen ants would attack a single worm. It would writhe and roll around as the ants attacked it. I don't know if they were biting them into tiny chunks to take back to their hives (do ants have hives? Mounds maybe? Nests even?) or if they were just going to sting them and then carry them whole to their mounds. I don't know. After watching it for awhile -and being in the midst of making lunch - I was feeling a bit squeamish myself. So I set the bag that I had lifted out in the rain (to wash all the other worms off) and headed back to the house.

I ended up telling KoKo about it. As a true step-daughter of mine, she was interested immediately and demanded that I show here the battle.

So back outside we went.

But since a few minutes had elapsed, the majority of the worms were gone. The ants could - we reasoned - have worked that fast, so we began lifting up other bags. There were several worms under them, but nothing like the mass I saw earlier. Finally, I had the bags out in the rain. The only next possible place was under a box. So KoKo asked me to lift it as she got into position for the best possible view.

I yanked it up and there were the worms. They were piled together into a wriggle cord. Again, instinctively, they all began to move in one direction - ultimately shaping a grotesque "U" - to find shelter again. Of course, the ants were on them immediately. Of course, KoKo and I brought the camera this time.

Those pictures may or may not be posted.

When Kistie came home for lunch, she didn't want to hear what we saw nor did she wish to see the footage.

We had grilled cheese sandwhiches and tomato soup for lunch. No one was keen on my idea of rice though.

Then, since I didn't have much planned for the rest of the day, I figured I'd write a little (as part of the RRVWP, I received a publication opportunity. Several people affiliated with the NWP are looking for 20 or so essay to put into a collection on teaching writing. And if you know me at all, this is right down my alley), so I thought I'd spend an hour or so typing up an outline of what my essay would cover and then I'd get some long overdue running in. Well, if you know me at all, I can turn an hour of writing into an entire afternoon pretty quickly. And sure enough. One hour passed. Then another. I think I finally got things rolling and had to stop for supper around six. But I was finally able to get a start on something I think I'm happy with. We'll see. I don't know if the professor (at the University of Arkansas) whom I contacted for more clarification on what my outlien/ proposal for the essay should look like will like my style or not. But I had a fun time writing my proposal. That's reward enough.

Again, if you know me at all, the one thing I hate is the formulaic, five paragraph theme approach to writing. So my essay will focus on three key epiphanies I had during my nine years of teaching. The first is titled "There aren't any topic sentences in here." This occured when I had several sections of sophomores reading through several popular magazines (Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Teen) looking for examples of 'good' writing - clear topic sentences, strong supporting sentences, and concise concluding sentences. See, I thought that if I had to teach the thesis support form for a research paper - which they did at the end of the year - I could begin the year by teaching the standard five sentence paragraph. Then I'd move them to the five paragraph essay. After that, they'd know the form well enough to expand it into their thesis-support research paper. Well, thank God one student was reading a Newsweek article on military hazing. His arm shot up in the air and he claimed "There aren't any topic sentence in here." I told him there must be. I took the article and read it. But there were any neat topic sentences. The article was written as a narrative. It caught the readers attention and moved them throug the story quite quickly. While I didn't see a traditional topic sentence, I didn't see a traditional supporting sentence either. Worse yet, most paragraphs were just a few sentences. On a closer look there wasn't a single paragraph that was five sentences. And there were even full paragraphs that were just single sentences - or worse - just single words. And the damned article was interesting and full of life. Unlike the crap I was teaching my kids to write.

So I chucked that idea.

The next epiphany happened a year later. I had stopped - for the most part - teaching the thesis-support form to my sophomores. But while writing personal essays on rites of passage, I found this whopper: "Shooting a cow while on my first deer hunt was a major rite of passage that taught me responsibility, safety, and humility." Now where had this come from? I hadn't taught him this. He must have gotten it in another class or from the middle school (I know I talked with a former writing teacher who used to show a diagram of a hamburger and tell his kids that writing was like that. The topic sentence was the top bun. The meat in the middle was the supporting sentences. And, you guessed it, the concluding sentence was the bottom bun.) So here was a personal essay just bursting with hummor, wit, sarcasm, and real pain and agony. But it had been chopped up and thrust back together into an awkward five paragraph theme that did justice to neither the writer nor the story nor the reader! So we looked at that essay and made it into a killer personal essay - and there wasn't a single topic sentence in the whole thing.

The third epiphany was in grad school. This couldn't be pinned down to just one moment. Rather it focuses on three authors: Willaim Zeiger, Tom Romano, and Paul Heilker. Zeiger argues that in our current writing curriculum we are dominated by the latter of half of the scientific process - proving. By focusing so much on this, we neglect the initial half of the scientific process - testing. And this is true. I used to read college essays and professional essays and be astounding by how these researchers came up with their ideas. I never saw the things they did when they read. I was amazed at how their minds seemed to thing in terms of proofs and solutions. That's a load of crap. They just didn't sit down and write their amazing thesis-solution papers from beginning to end. They did a lot of exploratory writing that led them to the conclusions they had. Then they took that exploratory writing (which Zeiger refers to as the 'testing' half of the scientific process) and re-fromatted it into the thesis-support style.

This gave my thoughts some legitamacy. After all, great, great writers have written personal/testing style essays that could stand alone (Dillard, Montaigne, Orwell, E.B White, and so on). Why do all that work and leave it chopped up and lying on the editing floor?

Next was the work of Tom Romano, who came up with a way to combat the thesis-support form (the multi-genre research paper). In his book, "Crafting Authentic Voice," he outlines a curriculum to teach voice and style rather than form. That book alone added years to my career. And he also raised an excellent point. Why do so many veteran teachers loathe reading those research papers. Don't be shy. How many of us have dreaded reading those suckers. I know I do. Not just because they are a lot of work, but because they are relatively boring, contain little student voice, and don't contain one ounce of personality. As Romano points out, you know who writes predominately in the thesis-support form? College students and those who are stuck writing a traditional thesis. YOu know who reads those works? Almost no one. Great point.

Finally, Heilker's book "The Essay" points out the danger of teaching the five paragraph theme. It's too easy. Once kids latch on to that form (as my poor student who wrote about shooting a cow instead of deer for his rite of passage did) cling to it and use it for ALL of their writing. It's an easy form to teach. I know during the year when I teach it, it's the only time I really feel like I have control over what and how the kids write. But Zeiger would argue that writing, especially personal, exploratory writing, is messy - and it's hard to feel like you're really teaching the kids anything as they write. This book helped me see where to place the thesis-support form in my curriculum (at the end - after plenty of personal writing).

Well, so much for my concise outline for my proposal! Of course, I'm thinking of talking about the exploratory writing and all the testing of ideas that I did and putting that into the essay too - to model how things are actually written - rather than leaving them chopped up and bleeding on the editing floor.

They may say it's a load of crap and reject it. But I'm fine with that. It was a hell of a time just writing it. And that's the real value of writing anyway.

Well, KoKo just informed me that I must drive her to her friend's homes so she can deliver her invitations for her upcoming sleep over. This routine is at an end.