After a weekend of visiting with old friends, a trip to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, and ripping out the bushes in front of my house to make way for new plants, I was feeling a bit behind in homework. I managed to pull it all together in time for class this morning though. One of the first things Dr. A mentioned in his lecture was a test he would be giving today that would count for 50% of our grade. Before anyone began hyperventilating, he grinned and let us know it was his idea of a joke. I have done this to my own students before. It's good to keep a sense of humor as both a teacher and student.
We didn't get as much time to paint today and spent more time discussing our latest class reading, Kathleen Walsh-Piper's Image to Word. My table realized as we talked how important it is to make meaning out of the things we see. The act of writing and the act of viewing art or anything require you to slow down and ponder. Ponder does not get used much in our cultural vocabulary anymore. I am not calling for our entire life to slow down, but I think it is really valuable to carve out time to understand yourself through something like writing or painting.
Which means enough reflection, and time for me to create.

A teacher's summer

Two weeks into my second class (Creativity in Teaching Composition) of the summer, I'm realizing how little time there is to just think during the school year. After my two hour class each day, I come home to eat a relaxed lunch and maybe watch a TED talk or an Anthony Bourdain episode. I almost enjoy doing my homework for my class (partly because half of it involves painting abstract art) since the homework is to practice my own personal writing. There are a couple of texts we use in the course, and there is plenty of guidance so you can't spend much time experiencing writer's block. Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones is THE book you need if you have ever considered putting pen to paper. All of this self-reflection on my writing and teaching writing got me to thinking about my students (past and present) for at least the zillionth time this summer. For having "time off" from school, this certainly isn't feeling very much like time off...

A teacher friend turned me on to the website and app, Good Reads. It is brilliant for those who love to read and I can't help but think of ways I could use this in the classroom. Some of the reviews out there on the website are so well written and I can definitely see students responding strongly to what others are saying. I am determined to include more student-selected reading this coming school year and I feel like this might be a tool to help me accomplish that. After our second month reading The Count of Monte Cristo last year, I still think it is important to have common knowledge in our culture into books by authors like Alexandre Dumas... BUT it is important that my students find something that catches their imaginations too. 

This is the time of the summer when I start to loose my previous year's feeling of desperation and regain hope for what my students and I can do in the coming year. I am so excited at this moment about getting back to my classroom and reading and writing.