travels with Grace

A few pictures at the museum:

Lots of water to pump and move and otherwise divert.

We really liked PVC pipe and whiffle balls . . . 

Through a piece of PVC pipe.

Not a particularly interesting picture, until you realize that she's ringing the doorbell at 123 Sesame Street!

The entire train ride home Grace played with her newly acquired silly putty.

Grace has a hard time looking strangers in the eye.

The train wasn't moving.

proofs

Be it resolved (so I need to remind myself) that I can't do everything I want to do.  I barely get a three paragraph proposal in on time, I have a dry erase board with unchecked boxes next to imperatives with exclamation points.  I have a stack of those extra applications to look through before tomorrow.  And none of this is anything I resent.  And, in fact, I did get that proposal in to the right person in time, and I do have some checkmarks in some of those boxes.  But it's all proof that there's too much to do, and not even sabbatical has changed that.

Also proofed today is this business card.  I've never had a business card before, partly because I almost never get asked for one and I assumed that I'd never go through the minimum number required for a printing before I had to change something.  But now that I won't get another promotion (unless something really disastrous happens, like administration) I ordered a whole 100 of these puppies.  This means that when someone asks for my card, I might actually have this on hand and won't have to write down my email address on a sticky note.  I wonder how long 100 business cards will last?

And, Billy proofed the interview, saying:

dear adam, i read through the piece and it sounds fine, and I even like the photos (your wife right?) i suppose you could clean up phrases such as "kind of" and "sort of" but basically it's fine. as far as new poems, I am attaching two. all best regards and thanks for clearing up that surface tension business. billy

This meant I got to read and forward on a couple of soon-to-be-published poems.

The chapter proposal I sent out this morning -- there wasn't much to do except panic when I realized it was due today.  I then went out with Grace to ride the new train to the city and go to the children's museum there.  A great time for both of us, and I kept thinking while riding this really great train -- heavy rail, two decks, comfortable seating, wireless internet and other fancy stuff -- that this makes the place feel like a real metropolitan area.  We rode to town, hopped on a light rail, got some lunch, went to the museum, and then just reversed the route to come home.  All the while we were surrounded by the streams of people who were also trying out the new train.  It was fun, and Grace was a fantastic traveler, patiently waiting for trains among the great crowds.

I got back to eat and then left to go to campus.  Yes, it's still my sabbatical, I contend.  I went to Honors to meet new students and their parents, and the director asked me to say a few words about my class.  I told them that, in spite of everything else they were hearing, I was proof that the honors curriculum was all about making faculty happy, rather than students.  I get to teach whatever I want, and I get to use the provost's money to fund my subscription to the New York Times, the ruse disguised as a course assignment.  They laughed.  Proof that honesty makes everyone happy.

poetic blackmail and other progress

I proofed the interview, sent it to Billy.  Haven't heard back.

I have also been tasked with the responsibility of getting him to contribute a couple of original poems to go alongside the interview.  I guess it's fitting for me to do this, as I'm the one whose talked with him the most in this operation.  Yet it's a little strange nonetheless.  I'm this literary rookie who happens to have the poet's email address and the responsibility to not give it out to anyone else.

So, I had to flavor this my own way.  I think he's amenable to submitting a couple of pieces, but I thought I'd add some pressure and humor to the situation by telling him if he didn't have anything to contribute that I'd contribute my own piece, the one I wrote a couple of months ago, now with a title and an extra comma:

Intellect You said you were worried, that maybe I think too much. You said you could only wonder, imagine what is running through my head. I said it's true that I'm a real intellect, standing before you in the kitchen in my boxer shorts, my fuzzy slippers on my feet.

Yes, I sent my cute little poem to a former U.S. poet laureate, and it was sent mostly as blackmail.  "If you don't do what we're asking, we're really going to ruin the overall state and integrity of poetry with this piece."

I think that this speaks to a bigger theme I've realized lately.  I often don't know how to do something, but I don't see someone else doing it so I give it a try.  (Sure, there are lots of things that I'm supposed to be doing and I deliberately avoid -- oh, look what's come up on Google news in the last 5 minutes -- but I am managing to recognize this and balance things a little better.  Slowly.)  I'm going to try to go to my dean and suggest, even propose, how we could enhance and expand science ed in the college.  It's not really my job to do this, but I think someone's got to do it.  Otherwise it just would never happen.  And maybe this is what I'm realizing more and more about "growing up."  There are lots of things that will be just fine even if I fail to follow through with or initiate something.  But, even in the state of being "just fine," certain things just won't ever be done.  

finished again?

I still need to read it just one more time (after many other reads, edits, editor edits, layout, my editing the editor's edits, editor re-edits -- each time a little less and a little more refined), but I think this might be done.  After the next read, I'll send it to Billy.  I really like to see it all laid out and pretty looking.  And there's my picture even.

"I thought you were done with that," Karyn pointed out this morning when I was, in fact, actively re-editing it.  

This afternoon I printed out some summer science seminar assignments for our teachers, and Stacy printed out a really beautiful itinerary of the trip from a linear accelerator to an astronomical observatory and everything in between.  It was almost a great meeting.  Turns out the administrator "helping" us told different groups of people different times to meet; and he invited new people who hadn't yet applied to attend.  There were excuses.  They guy's busy, and there are lots of communication channels.  But I was really annoyed.  The good news is that everyone really wants to go.  The problem might be that we've planned on 16 seats, but now we have 24 potential people.

We'll figure that out on Thursday.

Also good news: Doritos were "buy one get one free" at the grocery store.  Grace had her first t-ball practice, and she really likes it.  My noisy but efficient 2-stroke scooter is up and running after only about 2 minutes of fuss.  It was in the 70's today.  I made lots of headway on lots of very little things.

loser

I didn't win. And neither did Stacy. It went to a German professor.
Her bio was short; she stayed in teaching rather than going into
administration. I thought it was odd. Karyn thought it was a
travesty. I'm very lucky to have Karyn at my side.

metaphors are lightning (apologies to John Prine)

Lots of things happened today.  Somehow I feel obligated to write about all of these, and in some ways that's what a blog becomes too often -- a compiling of all of the events.  I also have realized that I forget all of these things after about three days.  Maybe it doesn't matter.  

First, it was pet day in kindergarten.  Kids were a bit frustrated that Grace seized up in front of the class while describing Tycho -- a bout of shyness that grabs her in these situations.  But, they were delighted to see him catch a frisbee.  The highlight, of course, was the cow.  It really showed up.  A small calf, three months old, but it was a cow nonetheless.  Mix this in with the dogs, the cat, the bird, the bunny, the frog . . . you get the idea.

Later, a trip to campus, grabbing this, and that; install a file on the computer, print that essay.  Grace played with the magnets.  I said hello to people.  I'll go back next week for graduation.  Brad told me that my sabbatical ends today.  I contested this.  I think he wants to send me assessment report stuff to fill out for the department . . . without feeling guilty about it.  Fine.  I'm still on sabbatical.  

I talked to John, him in his office, me at home with a goblet of beer.  It was better that way.  It's the last day of my sabbatical I'm told.  We added things to our list.  I realize that we talk about how slow "we" are on getting pages of the book created; and I realize that the slowness is me.  I'm on sabbatical, after all.  I'm continuing it through the month of May.  We added another book chapter for us to work on.  I need to start with a few paragraphs.  (Mental note: write a few paragraphs.)

I wrote a few documents to get us ready for a meeting with teachers who will be traveling across the state with us in August.  We'll use the vexation and venture format for professional development, and I tried to make this coherent in the assignment.  There's part of me that thinks this is hokey; but more and more of me all the time realizes that this works in a unique way.  And, having seen it in a few different contexts, I don't think it's a fluke.  Someone should be working on a book about that.

The girls and I picked up Karyn from work at the yarn store later.  We all ate together.  

And then I went to a play.  This play was written by a student of mine, graduating in a few days. I was amazed about: 1. someone I know and have even "taught" could be a playwright; 2. how it must be for the playwright to see his own work being performed; and, 3. what it must take to create a story that is both coherent and meaningful.  And feels like it's real.  

When I was in college I took a creative writing class because I thought I was good at it.  I'd liked making up stories in high school, and had even tried to submit things to a collection of stories in some horror and science fiction magazine.  I remember -- vividly -- the creative writing professor putting me in my place once I was in college.  Looking back on it, I'm a bit amazed that I wrote as much as I did, even attempting to create characters and stories and the like.  That seems really really hard to me now.  An essay -- or a blog -- is as creative as it gets . . . well, maybe.  But flashing back again, I remember another student reading one of my big efforts in creative writing, and she remarked about how it was good . . . and that I was a beginning writer.  I wondered out loud what made it so clear that I was a beginning writer -- I was a little defensive.  She said, "Writers just starting out just write about death or love."  It turned out I was writing about both.  It also turned out that I knew very little about either.  I think writing about these things was a manifestation of my non-understanding but fascination with the both of them.

Even now I suppose I write most about those things I know the least about.  When I do know what I'm writing (or teaching) about, I push things into metaphor and try to figure out more of the intricacies and themes of something by comparing them to something else.  It isn't always readable, but it's useful.  It's like tearing apart one of those engines and looking at the cross sections of the cylinders to see how they fire.  See, that's a metaphor.  A bad one.  Bad like a beer that's been over hopped because the homebrewer was trying too hard to use those home grown hops from his back yard.  See, there's another bad metaphor.  

Which is probably like something else . . . which I probably shouldn't try to describe.

Tomorrow, the Lightning (as of Thursday's practice) formerly known as the Pandas formerly known as the Rainbows will play again.  We practiced being lightning fast.  ("Lightning" beat out both "Speeders" and "Sparkles," I think, in our post-practice meeting on Thursday.)  Last week we got tromped on by a 6-year-old who is obviously doing the juice.  Okay, not really, but she was really fast and she could even kick the ball in specific directions . . . like towards the goal.  I think our girls decided that "Pandas" weren't fast after all, and they needed a change.  "Lightning," I concurred with them, "is really fast . . . and still really beautiful."  You know, like rainbows and pandas.  Apparently, we all need a metaphor to point us in the right direction and give us a rallying cry.

head above water

John sent me a new favorite poem of his by Marge Piercy, which I'd never read.  The first stanza goes like so:

The people I love the best

jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I think that John is one of those particularly rare people who not only admires those who "swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight," but actually practices it.  I always want to be that person as well, and sometimes, maybe often, I am.  But I also know that feeling of "bouncing like half submerged balls" is often an effort to just stay afloat.

But it's also exhilarating.  If we don't just jump out and start swimming, we talk ourselves out of it.  Today I started to panic a bit that I didn't have or hadn't arranged enough staff for the summer program in the parks.  And in the last 24 hours I've started to secure a few people and talk to a few others and make sure that they're still on board.  And today, knowing that we meet with the teachers for the summer seminar on Monday, Stacy and I figured out what we had to say and what we needed to prepare for that meeting.  I see a lot of people who aren't drowning, who are probably surfing easily back and forth, paddle out from the shore and then ride a wave back in, who just do the same thing over and over.  They don't fall behind.  They don't lose track of where they are out at sea.  They're comfortable.  It's pleasant.  It's too bad.

[I can say all of this having had the signature of the Board of Trustees on my final promotion.]

Now what?  Yes, finish that paper that I was writing about early this week.  Proof the interview that I was so excited about two days ago.  Keep swimming, bobbing around, wondering what new thing I'm going to run into.  

I ordered five books of poetry by David Lee, and I even had the nerve to put it on my university account.  I have some extra money saved up there, and I thought this would be appropriate and worthwhile.

I ordered a qualitative research software package that I'd been needing.  How soon will I use it?  Not sure.  Ryan, my student researcher, already knows how to use it from downloading the demo version.  If he stays this motivated I'm going to need to invest in more stuff for him.

Eric got some analysis back from a parallel study from psych [I always accidentally type that "psycho" first, and then have to backspace] that confirms what we've already been finding: online students don't understand the same things that in-class students do; and in-class students can imagine what their professor is thinking about the discipline in more sophisticated ways that the online students.  We found the same for physics last semester.  There's more data to collect.  There's a grant we need to write.  There I am, bobbing out there in the waves.  I started thinking that maybe this could be run with middle school students, to look at their thinking and imagining about how a teacher thinks.  This could be run at Larry and Ken's school, maybe with Matt's students.  Wouldn't that be fun?  And someone could go in and do an ethnographic account of what takes place there (justifying the $400 I just spent on analysis software) and we could even do something over the course of 4 years at that school.  Maybe.  If I don't get washed up on that shore.

I think people like John, Stacy, Eric, and many others, do a better job of negotiating that place off shore than I do.  Or maybe we all each see each other only when the head is above water.  When we're caffeinated.  There isn't a list of things we don't accomplish; we only publish and pay attention to the list of things we do accomplish.  That's fine.

Tomorrow there's a fun list of  tasks to pay attention to, but early in the morning is perhaps the greatest task of all: it's pet day in Grace's kindergarten.  Grace, Tycho, and I are going to kindergarten.  Rumor has it there will also be a turtle.  And I'm sure there will be other dogs.  And pictures of other things.  But the one that gets the award: Porter (I think) is bringing a cow.  A small one, a calf.  But still, it's a cow.  We'll see how that all turns out.

can't sleep

I got home tonight after an awards ceremony for College scholarship recipients and honored graduates.  I checked email, brushed my teeth, read some On The Road, "played" this "game" that's mostly a series of brain teaser puzzle things on my iPod, and then went to sleep.

Except I couldn't sleep. 

Today I saw the first run of galleys for the BC interview.  I haven't been able to proof the whole thing, but they look really great.  Pictures and everything, all strung together with blocked quotes set aside.  There are a couple of edits to make, but it's fun to see almost ready.

I read other things today, arranged a few things, added up some numbers, etc.  But I'm mostly restless from thinking about everything since the awards thing.  After that was finished, my Chair and Dean asked me and Stacy to meet someone, a family member of a foundation.  She was actually largely responsible for funding a large part of the summer program coming up, so I was happy to say hello.  When I got introduced, she grasped my hand and went on about how pleased she was with all the work I'm doing and how excited others were about what I'm doing and on and on.  It was unexpected and gratifying, and it didn't hurt that my dean was right there.  It was maybe that much more unexpected having just seen the cover of the school newspaper featuring this story and a photo of me, identified as Colin.  I'm pretty sure that was me, though.  

I got home, and saw emails from:

1. Julie L., asking me about articles that could bridge teacher practice and research.

2. Our university manager of internal grants, replying to me about how much money I have.  (Everything's where it's supposed to be, except my most recent travel hasn't gotten charged, yet.)

3. Our charter school director, responding to questions about a curriculum meeting and expanding previous ideas.

4. John, suggesting that there's a place for our recent symposium in a book, with ten points about how this would work and/or the limitations to consider about the endeavor.

It's this weird tossed salad of things that created itself while I was away, in a whole other tossed salad of interaction.  I don't have anything coherent to say about it all, and certainly nothing constructive to do about it until morning.  But it's swirling anyway.  Maybe I'll read more Kerouac.  Right now he's on the road, hitching hiking his way to Denver and eventually San Francisco.  He sleeps by day and moves by night.  

With that, I feel like I could sleep.  I don't need to hitch a ride any farther west than I already am, and the emails that I just got "today" now say under the Date Received heading "yesterday."  So I should sleep.

good day . . .

Today I traveled to the big city.  I had some slight misgivings only because it's Earth Day, and it turned out to be one of the few days I'd need to hop in a 6 cylinder vehicle to drive all by myself.  But it was worth it.  I'll ride my bike tomorrow.

First stop: Meet with Dina, who's finishing an independent readings with me and who will be evaluating the professional development for the teachers this summer.  I had a cappuccino and bounced around ideas about her prelim questions, research methodologies, and how these could be used for both the summer project and Crossroads.

Next, I drove up to Alta Lodge to meet with Rosie.  The place is going to be better than I'd even hoped, and I had pretty high hopes.  She showed me all the different rooms, the overall facilities, meeting spaces and arrangements.  Keynotes will be held in a large room with a full wall of windows facing the mountains; receptions are inside/outside in a room with three walls of windows and an adjoining deck.  Everything is cosy and every window points towards something grand and picturesque.  And, best of all, everyone there is easy to work with.  (They'll help with shuttling people to restaurants for dinner and they're calling the place across the street to make sure they stay open for our group.)  I'll go back for brunch later in the summer, and in the meantime I have menus to look over and spaces to think about.  

Then I drove back to the valley for lunch with Larry and Ken, who bought lunch (a brie sandwich with cranberry bread -- really really good, even if it doesn't sound like it . . . oh, shit that reminds me I was supposed to get a loaf of bread on my way home) in return for me connecting them with Matt, their new science teacher for their new school.  They're doing something amazing there already, and they want me to do something science ed researchy there.  They basically want me to tell them what I want to do.  And I really want to play along, but I have to figure out how to fit those hours into a day.  At the very least, it's exciting to see something that should be a logistical nightmare (a state charter working under a district with university partnerships) actually coming to fruition.  

Yeah, there's still a paper to finish.  Soon.  I haven't found the notes I was looking for.  I'll give up for now and just get something together and then worry.

A thing I've been thinking about lately kind of got highlighted by two people: Jack Kerouac (beat writer) and Dina (grad student).  I was wondering how those beat writers could be so prolific, even under influences of so many mood alterators, and Dina was wondering how anyone could be both in academe and have a family.  If I think too hard (or not hard enough) I'd come to the conclusion that doing drugs is better for writing than being part of a family.  But of course this isn't true.  There is that balance that I've been faced with while on sabbatical, though.  Here at home I fix oatmeal and walk to school and juggle with Karyn who's going to what meeting and how do we get from violin to soccer and shit I forgot you were working Friday (even though you work every Friday) when I scheduled that meeting.  My own screwups (e.g., the lost notes) and disorganizations and bumps in consciousness I blame completely on my own self.  On the other hand, I'm glad that when I'm confused or feel like I'm not concentrating it's often because I'm trying to remember to put air in the soccer balls or make sure I pick up Grace from kindergarten at 11:10.  It's a privilege to be given a chance to do more of those things -- one that most people in most jobs don't really get.

Finally, here's a nice image with an interesting question posed in a protest sign.  The answer is yes.  Colin, who sent this to me, wondered if this was clever or stupid.  There's a fine line in between the two.

tasks

Of my three tasks I set for myself today, I've so far completed one.
Another is partially completed. I was stymied throughout the day
looking for notes of a previous review -- the things I'm supposed to
be responding to. I'd made a hard copy of them, I'd sworn I'd saved
them in the dedicated folder with all the other stuff for this
project, and I'd sworn that they were archived in an old email system,
although that's certainly the least reliable.

I spent much of my day looking through files at home and at the
office. Looking through an archive of email and backed up hard drive
files. I did get to play with Apple's "Time Machine," which is
creepy, useful, and efficient. None of this offered even a glimmer of
what I was looking for. I'm mad at myself, frustrated, mystified, and
now cycling through coping strategies. The hard copied notes -- the
ones I was sure I'd brought home with me weeks ago -- must be here,
and I could spend more time looking in more places (although I don't
know where) for them. Or, I could give that up and do something much
less efficient. I'm relegating myself to some reading that I need to
do anyway.

While at the office I got to see people, talk shop and politics, find
some other papers I hadn't been looking for, and saw my picture in the
paper. It turns out that of the five finalists for the big university
teaching award, two of us are physicists. Stacy (the other finalist)
and I joked that this should rival most snowball-chance-in-hell kind
of scenarios at most universities. Fortunately, I work in a place
where I could honestly see five people from physics all deserving of
finalist status. That would be a fun party.

Tomorrow I meet a grad student, visit the conference site, and then
meet with some Salt Lake District folks about their new school. I
think they may have just hired a former student of mine, and together
they get to design the place from scratch and do teacher inservice and
university methods courses there.

Back to reading . . . which offers lots to write about as well. This
piece is calling on everything from Vygotsky to Communities of
Practice to Apprenticeship to Identity . . . basically a whole bunch
of old and new theoretical constructs, and then it's about to (I
think) show how they use it all. I think it's nonsense. Or maybe I'm
just hoping it is, since it will give me something good to argue
with. I'm in the mood.

advice

Hi John,

Thanks for the advice about my "should I be an editor" question.  Funny how different days I feel completely different about the prospect.  The last couple of days I've received the good advice that to be a good editor I should buy myself out of other things.  Wise.  At the same time I don't want to not do other things.  And this is my perennial problem.  I'm at an institution where I can do everything I want, and even encouraged to do so.  Behind me is a trail of unfinished projects, haphazard completions, and many many ideas left unstarted but well intentioned.  

The journal is one of those "well intentioned" things, and I'm happy to leave it there for a while.  There are books to write, after all.  Today, realizing that to finish one of my little tasks I need to first find the f-ing file with reviewers comments  . . . nowhere to be found.  Probably in my office. Sigh.

This is all my realization that adding one more thing -- even one that is theoretically being in lieu of other projects -- is going to be one more thing.  And I don't think that is the direction I need right now.  In fact, it's the direction I've been trying to re-direct myself away from.  

That said, I've thought about the "timeline" that we've been assigned and I've started sketching out.  In that, I've just thought to add something that is beyond the horizon.  Perhaps others who assign these things expect not just the reality of the near future, but the possibility of the more distant.  In that more distant possibility, my ambitions to do some journal editing and to create something out of Crossroads that is journal-esque seem to be appropriate for the 3rd generation . . . or maybe even sooner.  That's another reason not to get involved in another editing project.

In essence, I'm learning to say "no" once in a while, but also looking forward to more projects.  Too many, but at least I can pick and choose in such a way that they're focused.

[As I'm writing, I realize that this is a free-ramble figure-shit-out kind of email.  So I'll see if this will also post to the blog at the same time I email to you.  Interesting concept, and I wonder what kind of profile I'd paint of myself if all of my emails ended up in the blog.  I think it would be disturbing.]

Researching a little bit about Collins today and Poetry 180 for this final piece of the interview that should actually be going to press.  As a result, I stumbled upon this new piece in the Poetry 180 list.  While I'd presume that the "advice" is about how to be a poet, it's left open to really be advice for pretty much anything, including perhaps our professional selves (e.g., a good candidate for the inside of a Crossroads proceedings) or graduate work, and perhaps a good opening for a workshop in a few months.  I think the mentality of working to "laugh so loud" that one is shushed and then starting again is exactly what we aren't trained to do.  But should be.

Off to find that file folder.

-a

free physics

On Friday night we hosted our annual physics open house.  The first year we did this we were surprised, in both a pleasant and terrifying way, to find hundreds of people showing up.  This year we're estimated we had a thousand people in attendance.  For physics.  It's free, and I think it's fair to say that we actually have a bunch of interesting stuff: check your household goods for lead, get a lecture on searching for extraterrestrial life, see a bunch of physics demos, stay outside and look through telescopes or blow bubbles on a cushion of carbon dioxide, and lots more.  Still, it's physics.  So, it's really surprising and oddly flattering when people who can't get into one particular demo show are actually angry -- not just disappointed.  

This year, Colin and my "Circus of Physics", for which we did two shows that each sat over a hundred people, was "sold out" before we'd even advertised the open house to begin.  We've been told that next year we need to move to the big room.  At first I balked at this -- that isn't the room with the bowling ball pendulum of death, and how do you do a bowling ball pendulum of death experiment without the bowling ball pendulum of death?  And the room isn't where I'm used to doing things, and it's big, and . . . but then I started thinking about getting all those people in there, kind of like the 240 8th graders we fit in there to see a glowing pickle.  And now I think it's a great idea.  I was up two nights ago wondering if we could do the "shoot the monkey" experiment across this double sized lecture hall . . . 

This circus and demos in general are one of the most fun things I get to do.  It's doubly great that people show up wanting to see this.  Sure, there's the comedic and entertainment value -- Colin and I riff off of one another, we make something explode, someone gets a cinder block smashed on top of him while he's laying on a bed of nails, we levitate a pool ball over Colin's head, etc.  But ultimately if people really wanted to just see something that was funny or mildly entertaining they wouldn't stand in line on campus on a Friday night.  They could rent a video.  It's fun to see that science can actually be a draw.

It's helped that I work in a department that really values this stuff and has a great time putting it all together.  There are lots of ways that this would not work.  We've managed to avoid these, and find quite the opposite.

The following evening we celebrate Stacy and Michelle's earning of tenure.  That meant lots of food, friends, and drink.  I learned again that I'm getting older, as the next morning I felt like I'd been run over.  I had four drinks.  More than almost any other day of the year, but not so far out of whack that I'd think I deserve to feel like roadkill.  Still, the party was a great time, and to have it the night after the open house was actually pretty good timing.

Tomorrow, I lined up three tasks:

1. Write a bio of Billy Collins -- I saw "my editor" at the party last night who said he was almost ready with my interview.

2. Read one piece and revise a paper on undergraduate research that I've been meaning to revise since January.

3. Read a review for a paper that Eric and I and others have accepted, pending revisions.

I figure if I write this down, I'll have something to be accountable to.  Sure, there are other things to be writing that the avid reader may be wondering about, but I'm going to aim for three and be very proud if I can get that far.

sonny's blues

I read (for the first time) Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin a few days ago.  The passage that particularly got me was this:

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

I don't particularly know what it is that I like about this.  More correctly: I don't know how to express what it is that I like about this passage.  I think it's the possibility of being able to create meaning out of a void, out of a roar, and to be able to celebrate the triumph collectively from what someone else is creating and expressing.  In the story, the music serves as a way to express what couldn't be said otherwise.  It tells what can't be said, and it responds to a voice within that can't be heard.

And, I liked that it was a piano that was being played.

20000 (good) fortunes

I can't figure out where to start in describing a brief trip with Karyn to San Francisco, so I'll start in the middle of the trip and in the middle of Chinatown, where we were strolling to find the fortune cookie factory. I'd been there before a couple of years ago -- not something you stumble upon, but have to make sure you map, look for and keep your eye out for.  It's very literally in a narrow alley, an unassuming door opening into a space that only a few people can squeeze into at the same time.  On that day, in addition to the three different ovens with a weird hybrid of a lazy susan and waffle maker mechanics, there was a man (presumably the owner or manager of the place) who was greeting people and telling them about everything and answering all conceivable questions.  

Making a fortune cookie at the said "factory" is actually a completely manual job, aside from the rotation of the batter on little plates through a gas fired oven.  Once the batter is cooked, it comes out of the oven as a little pancake; a woman opens the waffle iron-like contraption to reveal this really hot little pancake; and then she proceeds to pick this up with her fingers (she confirmed that she has blisters), place a fortune message in the pancake, then fold it over once with her fingers and then again on a steel post, and finally place the still hot but hardening cookie in a tray.  One at a time, each one hand picked and folded.

The owner told Karyn when she asked that they produced 20,000 fortune cookies a day.  I gave an astonished reaction to his quick reply -- one I'm sure he recites many times an hour -- and in response to my astonishment he turned to the "factory" and pointed out that he had three of these contraption ovens for the mass production.  Oh, right.  Three.  So, then you only have to make 7,000 fortune cookies a day at each of these ovens.  

What struck me was the very sincere, matter-of-fact statement: I have three ovens.  That makes the 20,000 fortunes possible.  It also led to a discussion later with Karyn about how many fortune cookies are consumed each day, and how much of the necessary supply could be accounted for by the little factory in the back alley in Chinatown.  We tried to estimate how many Chinese dinners were eaten in a day -- I facetiously started to suggest the 1 billion in China.  No, just the U.S.  So, we estimated that there are 300 million people in the U.S., that maybe they each get Chinese food once a month on average, so there's a 1-in-30 chance each day that each U.S. citizen has for eating a fortune cookie.  That's 100,000 cookies per day.

So, we'd need at least 15 of those ovens.

Other stuff: lots of cable car riding, coffee shops, good soup and shepherds pie, a really good cup of "drinking chocolate" -- no, it's nothing like hot chocolate and if you think otherwise then you are just uncultured swine -- a walk to see parrots on Telegraph Hill, several good bookstores . . . including City Lights, where I picked up On the Road for the first time, because I was there in the Beat section and because I couldn't think of a better place to start such a journey.  And, I picked up Ferlinghetti's Poetry as Insurgent Art, not because I wanted to learn how to be an insurgent as a poet, but because much of what is stated here is not simply about poetry, but about greater calls to action in general.  The advice for poets could be easily extended to the lot of us interested in social action.  

My favorite so far: 

"Strive to change the world in such a way that there's no further need to be a dissident."

Speaking of poetry, while away I was reading work of former Utah Poet Laureate David Lee.  And today I invited him to read at Crossroads, and a few hours later he responded with an emphatic and enthusiastic "yes".  It was perhaps the easiest poetry booking in history, or at least compared to what I've arranged (and failed to arrange) before.  So now I'm looking forward to someone who writes about pigs, southern Utah canyons, and the notion of discovery:

What
I meant to say
have you found?

Look
he shouted clearly
what I discovered!

flowers in my hair

Tomorrow morning Karyn and I get up and leave the kids here with Oma as we catch a plane to San Francisco.  After I finish writing this, I'm closing the laptop and leaving it behind.  The books I'm bringing are a couple of poetry collections and a short story.  There's one other chapter tucked away in my bag and a notebook, but mostly I'm bringing this just as an insurance policy.  It will make me feel as though I have something I could do that's academic, but I don't have to.  There's some cable cars to ride, fortune cookies to watch being folded out of dough, some yarn stores to visit, bookstores to peruse, cafes to search out, and pubs already mapped.  And I'm sure there's other stuff.  It's a lot to do between now and Tuesday afternoon.

There's lots to do when I get home, too, and a lot of it is stewing here on the laptop.  All the more reason to leave it here in the 'off' position.  Other stuff starts to creep into my mind, including . . .  well, I don't need to worry about that now.  

inspiration

Today I finished a flyer to help donors see the point of Crossroads, and I made this poster:

Brad (pictured here) is profiled on the front page of our local paper, as he is one of a couple of distinguished scholars honored this year at the university.  (I should clarify: The photo is basically stolen from the paper, while the title and caption are my own additions.)  What I love about the picture is that it is both a portrait of passion for teaching and a potential portrait of a crazy person.  The squiggles on the board and the depiction of the passion he has could be that of a lunatic, or of a teacher.  It's hard to tell the difference.  And I think that's what I love about teaching.  You can push certain limits that aren't allowed in other contexts (yes, John, your "inside voice"); or I suppose that teaching can be a cover for deeper lunacy.  Either way, it's a good profession. 

My other inspiration lately has been the encouragement to keep writing, even though what I'm writing about isn't really well described or cited.  I suppose that's the point of writing something new.  I've never really felt that writing stuff from "scratch" -- i.e., making stuff up as I go along -- was a bad idea.  Yet I also realize the shortcomings it poses.  I'll just keep spitting stuff out, undaunted by my own ignorance.  That made me go back today to look at drafts of bits and pieces of chapters and start to organize them, and to look at different outlines of the text to see where we first thought it was going to go versus where it seems to be going now.  It's a whole different beast, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it mutate again.

Tomorrow it should finally start to get warmer, and our soccer team (5-year-old girls, including Grace) will play game #2 of the spring season.  In the fall they called themselves the "Rainbows."  Last week, they spontaneously nominated and unanimously selected a new name: the Pandas.  As Hannah explained to me, it's a good name because "Pandas are fast runners."  Go Pandas.

making stuff up

I realized today that I don't know what I'm doing.

Sure, you could say that I should have known this a long time ago.  I did.  It's easier not to admit it to oneself.  You could also say things like, "oh, that's not true -- look at all you're doing . . ."  Yeah, that's fine.  I'm not saying I'm in a downward spiral into some despair filled pit.  I'm just saying that there are days when it's completely accurate and useful to say that I don't have the expertise to back what I'm trying to accomplish.

What I'm working on is really to write and even theorize models for professional development in education.  This isn't my expertise.  It's just what I've fallen into.  I've barely read anything about it, and the literature I know about is mostly foreign to me.  Again, I'm not spiraling downward.  In fact, this is useful to realize.  There's a chapter I need to read, another text to consider.  Still, I have the distinct feeling that what we come up with in describing professional development the way we're aiming to, we'll be making things up.  The things we've come up with, simply from our one example, include three pieces:

1. Critical review

2. Practice community

3. Joint responsibility

And I was going to write about these, just to continue to practice, but then as I was halfway through typing #2 my mind ran into this wall of thick slush and everything slowed down.  So it's too late at night to really do this right.  (So there's my assignment for tomorrow.)  But, I should remind myself that we made this up generally, slowly, felling our way around a dark room for the past 4 years.  We never stated these cute little phrases until a lunch conversation a week ago, and then we put these together in about 2 minutes, with one modification a few minutes later.  What does it mean when 4 years of work can become summarized into a framework that requires 2 minutes of thought?  Too simple?  That we really are just making stuff up?  Or that I may need to do a lot more reading.  Maybe all of the above.

imagery

A friend wrote in her blog about several events involving the dramas of parenting and working and surviving, and (as per usual) got lots of feedback from those living out there on the internet.  Most of the feedback that she gets, though, pertains to how to raise toddlers.  Having seen toddlers before, I simply nodded in empathy about the stories of irrationality and trying to be rational in such a landscape.  The piece of her entry that caught me more was about the coffee.

We've all done this: set something on top of the car while trying to balance child/book/keys/door/bag/coat/etc. operations in the process of trying to get somewhere fast.  Leave object on top of the car.  Drive away.  I did this once with a hamburger.  A really good hamburger and I was really hungry and to this day I still remember my sadness.  That was over 20 years ago.

In S.'s case, the cartopped object was a mug of coffee.  And on this day it was particularly important.  So, as the story goes, she drives off, takes the kids to daycare, realizes (I suppose it was at this moment that realization took place, though perhaps it was upon hearing the 'thump' of the mug rolling off the car) where the precious mug has gone, and -- my favorite part -- returns to the 6 way intersection to get the coffee cup.  "Unscathed," she describes both herself and the mug.  "Just needs a good washing," she says, I assume referring to the coffee cup.

For me, there was one missing piece: Did she take a sip of the coffee right there in the middle of the intersection?  I picture a circular interchange, S. standing in the middle of it, New England drivers honking as they scream around the bends of the interchange; but there, in the midst of it all, someone is salvaging not only the mug by the last few drops that were surely there in the container.  Surely.  That is the picture I'm holding onto -- not just going back to the interchange (which has by now grown to a monstrous exchange of commuters, buses, and semi trucks all rocketing around in circles at highway speeds), but standing there in the middle of it all, picking up the mug, shaking it ever so slightly to confirm that something is still in it, and taking that needed drink.

Giving the finger to some guy as he races by makes the image that much better.

The problem I often have with my writing, I'm coming to realize more and more all the time, is that I get too involved with the imagery and not involved enough with the substance.  In this case, the image alone is fun to play with and maybe even important in its own right.  But the other stuff that I'm supposed to be working on often gets started with an image to hang ideas onto, and then I end up working not as hard as I need to on the argument.  A first draft of a paper I was working on yesterday started with the imagery of a picture frame, how it improved the look of a picture within, how it replaced the need for sticky tape to adhere images to an office wall, etc.  But then I had to actually make a point that was more than a paragraph long and actually detailed the "theoretical framework" I was trying to give an analogue for.  Well, that was harder.  

Sometimes I think I'm just getting lazy, trying on a few gimmicks just to get me going.  Maybe this blog is one of those.  

I've also mused to myself, sitting in the comfort of my home with the comfort of my own scheduling, that maybe this sitting around and musing is exactly what writers do.  Except that I have to write about something, I have to respond to other ideas, I have to be accountable to a greater body of work than the insights I get when staring at my navel.  So, I should make some more progress on the stacks of books that I've checked out of the library, the folders of printed articles, and the notes of papers to read or email people about.

This isn't to say that I haven't been busy, though.  I cleaned up the backyard yesterday, in between our days of snow and sleet and hail.  I've sent out a call for papers.  I've been officially turned down by Billy Collins to be our speaker.  I've inquired about other poets.  I wrote out an outline of the talk I'm giving next month.  I've responded to more emails than I care to think about, and probably created more email traffic for other people than they deserve to deal with.  I've dealt with funding issues for my summer program, and now am starting to wonder how the hell we're going to pull it off.  It's not "if", just "how".  But I'll worry about that task tomorrow.

new routine

Three-quarters of the way through the official sabbatical time, I
decided to reform my schedule a bit. Tonsils, travels, and other
things kept me off balance for a while, but starting yesterday I
thought I should get myself out of bed before everyone else (a habit
I'm accustomed to while I'm "working"), have some coffee and start
writing. Then I'm still here when the girls get up, we have
breakfast, and they're off to school. I could keep working and go on
a walk or hike with the dog, come back and return to writing, etc.

And this mostly works so far. As I left with the dog for a quick hike
yesterday, sleet started pounding down, but mostly just bouncing off
my raincoat rather than doing anything substantial. Today Tycho and I
took a shorter walk, but looping around to pick up Grace from school
before coming home for lunch. It was only about half an hour out of
my day, but a great diversion.

Later today I'd be out restocking the shed (newly built, but not by
me, which is just as well). I asked the girls what they missed most:
the stacks of stuff with a big yellow tarp over it, or the rusting
collapsed shed that was being replaced. Anna's just started this year
to get my ironic "humor." Grace takes things more literally, so she
found the choices to be a little confusing. She does like the new
shed, though.

Still later today I got to go back to curling . . . and losing. I
wouldn't have been so painful except that it was to students.
Fortunately there was some Guinness after.

More important than curling or putting a lawnmower back into a shed, I
did actually write today. This included the beginnings of an
editorial with John, which will be our first attempt at explaining the
framework that guides Crossroads. I also worked quite a bit on
emails, especially a few that were actually meaningful. One was to
clarify my meaning in critiquing a NARST session about "research-into-
practice," something which almost always (though accidentally)
portrays teachers as lower life forms than us fancy researchers. That
always bugs me, but it particularly got to me at NARST last week. I
also started to describe a keynote talk I'm giving at an advisors'
conference next month.

This is all to say that I haven't performed any miracles. You could
even qualify all of this as relatively boring. But, it's good to have
a routine that's worked for at least two days. Tomorrow my mother-in-
law gets to town, so it may all go to hell -- there will be other
things to attend to. The particularly good part of all this is that I
get to leave for San Francisco with Karyn on Sunday morning while the
kids stay here with Oma. Everyone's delighted with the arrangement.

what I learned

After my first science ed conference, back in 2000 when I was in graduate school, I started scrawling out the lessons I'd learned from the experience.  Later I typed these out and sent them off to a few friends, and sometimes someone reminds me of these or I myself flash back to them.  This year, I tried to recreate the list, but it doesn't look quite the same.  I suppose I'm learning different things.

What I learned at my first 8th NARST (and AERA) conference (and points in between):

1. 10 days (and 3 cities) is a long time to be away from home.

2. There are real dinosaur bones in the natural history museum outside of Central Park; and, no matter how cliche and distracting dinosaur bones are in science ed., they are really really amazing, and you just don't know how much until you see them for yourself.

3. Boys and girls are different.  Wanting to play catch with Dad on summer nights was actually quite complicated and deep after all.  (Thanks to Eleanor, mother of 2 boys, for helping me with this.)

4. Physicists, I hate to admit, really do fit a stereotype.  Once you know this and know how to handle it, everything's just fine.  And, you can handle physicists on any campus in the country.  Until you've figured this out, though, they can be a pretty tough group.  On any campus in the country.

5. Amtrak is really cool.  I think that train thing could really take off, so to speak.  They should consider making those go all the way across the country someday . . .  Hmmmm.

6. FARSE is probably dead.  

7. A guy from Iowa with an Aussie accent kicks my academic backside in ways that always propel me forward.

8. Still, after 8 years of doing this, there's still that grumpy guy in almost every session I go to.  this time, though, he dug into me.  And, this time, I quite appreciated it.

9. Rosie O'Grady is both the name of a bar in Manhattan and the name of a conference organizer at Alta.  I like both.

10. Line 1 at the Charles Street Deli in Baltimore is "cash only".

11. It takes about 2 minutes to come up with the principle components of a theoretical framework.  Publishing it shold take about 2 years.

12. Not all lawyers are bad.

13. Everyone loves to watch the Muppet rendition of Danny Boy.  Brandi Carlile's invitation to a 9-year-old girl still makes John tear up.  (And me too.)  The Pillsbury Doughboy makes everyone laugh at humor on par with a 10-year-old boy's fart joke.

14. Societal change can start with a guy named Greg in a small office overlooking New Jersey from the 67th floor of the Empire State Building.  Greg does this because we need him to, but also because he loves it.  We should all be so deliberate and blessed.

15. The wrong track at the subway station leads you to the Brooklyn Bridge.  At night.  It turns out, that's not such a bad thing.

16. There really is a Johnny Utah.

17. My best NARST interactions: Beofre the meeting even started.  During a lunch of shepherd's pie.  The symposium we gave. A late dinner after ducking out of FARSE.  

18. I no longer believe a certain person looks like the evil child king from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.  In fact, by all reports he's a very nice and thoughtful person, and I'm ashamed I ever imagined otherwise.

19. No session is ever without at least one presenter who cannot conceptualize the passage of time.  I think it's some kind of real misconception, dual processing shortcoming, and this could be a real research study.  When the presider signals "5 minutes," why does every presenter say "oh!" as though it's a complete surprise?  Doesn't anyone prepare for these things?  Do we really put this little thought into what we do?

20. I have really good friends in lots of places, and more people I owe a great deal to, and even more people I want to know more. Still, 10 days away is a long time.  Maybe I should host  my own conference someday.

home

Arriving home, I realized my exhaustion and spent most of the day yesterday just in a daze.  I did some laundry.  I unclogged a drain in the bathtub.  I shaved.  I deleted some emails.  I played some piano.  Mostly, though, I've just been in a daze.

Yesterday we went to the opening event of Weber's Undergraduate Literature Conference, where Anna, age 8, had been invited to read her favorite poem.  There were a few other kids, but mostly faculty, writers, a local DJ, etc.  Anna barely reached the podium and read in her quiet voice, "The Dentist and the Crocodile" by Roald Dahl.  I was proud, not so much because she was an eloquent reader (she's 8, after all) but because she did it, speaking into the microphone and subtly changing her voice to emulate the dentist versus the crocodile.  

Later, walking across campus, Anna and Grace would find themselves climbing up big boulders supporting the steep slope above a campus building.  Then, running once they'd made it to the top, they found the grassy part of the slope and rolled themselves down it, repeating this over and over.  

Grace came to me today and hinted that I needed to go look at my desk, and there I found a handwritten letter from our 5-year-old.  It read:

Dear DaD

I Love U DaD

I Wot to 

Be a Frmr

LoVe Grace

She later told me that she forgot to add that part about not just wanting to be a farmer, but that she wanted to be a farmer in Texas.  From where this originates, we don't know, but it is well embedded in Grace's framework for what she wants to do when she grows up.  She also wants to play banjo.

While I was gone, Karyn called me to tell me that a good friend of ours had died suddenly and unexpectedly after only recently getting a cancer diagnosis.  One of the nicest men you'd ever meet.  Very tragic, but particularly so as he was a father of two girls, friends of Anna and Grace.  While I was gone, the girls had nightmares and no one slept well.  I've been shaken as well, but being away I was able to be distracted quite a bit by simply not stopping too long to think too hard.  But, it was most hard to be away from the girls when they had this to grapple with, thinking about the hole left behind for another family and the hole I'd left them to stare at.  Our hole was temporary, though.  I got to come back.  The girls wondered why Karyn was crying so much when they greeted me up at the airport -- they were laughing as I grabbed them both and picked them up.  I'm glad they don't have to know.

images of Baltimore

Baltimore

There's an old song, The Streets of Baltimore, that I'm suddenly struck by.  Here I am in the BWI airport, stuck for another 3 hours before I board my new flight.  The original itinerary wasn't going to get me to my connection in Minneapolis in time, so now I'm re-booked on a non-stop flight home.  So, a lot delayed leaving, an hour delayed in actually landing because of the new route.  Still, I can't get home soon enough, unlike the woman in the old song who stayed in the city with the "bright lights," as "she love the city more than she loved me."

Baltimore was great, and my current spot in the airport's observation deck, looking over the runways from a row of white rocking chairs that deserve to be on the front porch.  It was my most unexpected find in Baltimore.

Today I finished my tour of the city with an hour walk on the opposite side of the inner harbor, taking some routes up to the old earthen fort in the harbor, visiting the docks, discovering that a microbrewery had been consumed by a Hooters, and generally looking back at the skyline surrounding the harbor and laying out the visited spots during the NARST conference.

The tall tower to my right was the conference hotel, opposite side of the harbor from where John and I actually stayed.  Yes, I went to sessions.  But more than ever I found myself in hallways actually doing work: talking to people about Crossroads endeavors, planning future meetings, debriefing sessions and pursuits.  One lunch meeting with Brian Hand and John spurred us in intentional directions with a real timeline.  A previous meeting with our advisory panel for Crossroads gave us an overall sense of mission.  And then everything that followed was actual hard work, not in the hard labor kind of way, but in the can't find a corner to sit and write because I kept finding myself in deep discussions.  

John and I seemed so deeply engaged in this new project that the very notion of even trying to think about doing something for FARSE was mostly impossible.  In years past, it came naturally.  Eleanor suggested to us that it's because we've turned into the very people we used to poke fun at (serious scholars or old boring people?) and that it wasn't funny to us anymore.  I think it's because we've found a serious place and way to position our work.  It isn't any longer a scattered set of presentations and attended sessions, but now a cohesive mission.  It's exhausting and focusing.  John, I think, sees the cause as his admittance that FARSE no longer, or maybe never did, serve a critical satire that anyone actually "got" and did anything with.  It was an outlet for us and a training ground for future pursuits, but never took on real meaning beyond a few souls.  We couldn't maintain that.

John and I gave a brief, mostly improv introduction to FARSE, and then quickly slipped out for dinner with a few old friends, before we had to witness a train wreck.  Long story, but it seemed to me that FARSE was living out the sad episode of a fish at home that never dies.  Instead, it just slowly becomes less and less viable, leaning over to one side into perpetuity.  It just needs to be quickly flushed.

Fortunately, we found other viable work.  The symposium we gave at NARST went really well, generated discussion (including critique) and was engaging.  At least I thought so, and others said so, and I talked to people about the session later in those spontaneous tap-on-the-shoulder kinds of ways.

So, now, John and I have work to do.  Working this morning, I was writing down a timeline (an assignment for Dr. Hand) and thoughts and tasks.  The tasks started getting written out like this: conference proposals (3), articles (2), and books (1).  A long list, but I have a clearer sense of what these are supposed to look like and what they are for than I've ever had before.  

So, while I'm really anxious to get home, it's been a good trip.  I don't want to do it again soon, but I have a feeling that I'm going to look back on this 10 days as being a seminal moment -- something that shapes a direction of my career in a distinct way.  We'll see.