July 26, 1999

Today I started thinking seriously about school. I spent the morning looking over my new textbooks. The course syllabi, as they've been handed to me, are wonderfully out of date. This is great because I take it as tacit permission to do some of what I will to the material.

It's been a long time since I've had to work with grammar and composition texts. I'm stunned at how much they contain and leery of how useful they might actually be in students' growth toward competence in writing. This attitude grows from years of seeing students become somewhat better writers in the course of their year with me by writing a lot for a variety of purposes, reading and responding to each other's work, revising for their and my purposes. Blah, blah, blah.

The literature anthologies are typical...worthy of praise in some areas and shame in others. That seems to be the nature of anthologies. Previous classes have been amused by my strategic rants about the design and content of their textbooks. I'll have plenty of rant-fodder with these.

As I sit down to think about the syllabi, I realize the thousands of large and small decisions that need to be made. And I realize that because I'm in a new school I really don't have the necessary background to make those decisions. What are the details of this place that will make all the difference? What are the details of my physical classroom that will create needs and problems I'm not even imaging at this point? What are the issues and habits afoot in this place among students and faculty that create opportunities and problems? This uncertainty is part of the adventure, but it makes me conscious of how well I had fitted myself into the old place and how long that had taken to achieve. Am I up for it? I've got to be.

O.K. This journal entry is not so thrilling today, but these are the things that cluttered my brain.

Another good thing was that Marc from Barcelona showed up in my Guestbook. I'd been concerned that he might just drop off the face of the earth. He was an exchange student in English III last year. He proved to be a very good writer, an interesting risky thinker, and (something that most of his peers probably didn't know) a lively conversationalist. We would meet usually on Mondays after school and talk for an hour or so. Good practice for Marc, and I was able to satisfy some curiosity about a kid from another country and culture. I think he felt a little uneasy about making me stay after school, but I always enjoyed kicking back. For some reason I've always had an interest in Spain that I lacked in the rest of Europe.

I squeezed in a jog this afternoon in the sweltering sun, but had a breeze to keep me at it. Still, I cheated a little. Nice dinner out with Bernie, Dominic, and Kyrin who's visiting from Louisville for a few days. And just a few minutes ago I stumbed upon Mike Kwiecien in for a canoe trip - haven't seen him in many moons.