Apr 05
By Traci GardnerBritish Literature, poetry, Uncategorized Tennyson
Tennyson’s "Locksley Hall" isn’t the Victorian poem I like the most, but it is the one that gave me the publication bug. For a survey class, I was asked to write an analytical paper on something we’d read. I had gotten into the habit of looking up every mythological reference. Early in the poem, the speaker explains:
Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.
Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.
I spun the references to Orion and the Pleiads into an explanation of how the mythical figure’s life parallelled that of the speaker. When the graded paper was returned, Professor Peter Graham had written in the end comment that he thought the paper was publishable. Two years later (damn you, slow print publication world), I had my first vita line:
"Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall.’" Explicator 44.2 (Winter 1986): 23–24.
It’s one of those papers that I reread and wonder whether that was really me. I guess my voice and style have developed a good bit since then. But one thing hasn’t changed—I still want to see my name in print. A lot. Thank you Tennyson (and Dr. Graham).
Jan 27
By Traci GardnerUncategorized
I’ve spent the evening getting ready for a conference call tomorrow morning. Part of the work has been logistical–rearranging things in the room so that I can set up a printer. Online documents are great, but I still rely on printouts when I’m in meetings. It’s an old habit, born of necessity. The one time I took my laptop to a meeting at work, I was reprimanded and told to never do it again. So much for the 21st-century workplace, huh? Along with my printouts, I rounded up a journal to take notes in.
Oct 19
By Traci GardnerUncategorized wordpress
Yes, I’ve been off this blog’s little sphere of the world for quite a while. Long stories, all of which we’ll skip. I have been writing regularly on the Inbox Blog for NCTE, so I haven’t been completely gone from the world of blogs.
And I’ve been twittering as both tengrrl (for educational colleagues) and hokiebunny (for my WyldRyde friends) for quite a while now. Been a few other places, done a few other things. They’ll all show up eventually.
For now, I think it’s good enough that I’ve converted from Blogger to WordPress, which turned out to be much, much simpler than I thought it would be. Obviously there’s much still to be done. I want to customize a theme, clean up the sidebars, work on categories, and so on. I’ve played with WordPress before, but never to any great extent so it may take a little while to get things exactly as I want them. Tonight my only other goal is to get rid of the ‘just another wordpress blog’ taglines. After all, it’s not JUST another one. It’s MINE.
Aug 29
By Traci GardnerUncategorized
Okay, here’s what I want: go to one page, write a blog entry/update, click “Post,” and the info merrily zings off to all the sites I want it to—Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, etc.
Sort of the opposite of Plaxo. Here’s a reasonable explanation of Plaxo in the An Unmanageable Circle of Friends article from the Washington Post:
On Aug. 6, online address book Plaxo introduced Pulse, its solution to the walled garden syndrome (i.e., if you wants to see a pal’s Facebook entry, you too must belong to Facebook; to gawk at his Flickr photos, you too must Flick). Pulse users can stream everything from Amazon wish lists to del.icio.us Web markers directly into Pulse accounts. To Wellman’s point, they can also separate which groups of people receive which types of information.
I want to go to a single site and be able to cross post to all my different (and appropriate) places. I know such a thing could lead to abuse. Would be the dream tool for spammers. The problem is that I have different people who follow me in different places, and it’s beyond annoying to have to post to each site separately. So c’mon, someone come up with my dream blogging tool.
Aug 16
By Traci GardnerUncategorized
I’ve finally got goals written out for FY08, and they call for a lot of tracking and logging and scheduling. My head is swimming as I try to figure out what tools will work for which part. I think that I need three different things:
- A system to track different content for ReadWriteThink (RWT) and Inbox that lets me apply tags or index the content. I need to be able to report on a quarterly basis that X lesson plans addressed NCTE’s strategic goals focus on (as an example)
multimodal literacy. Mostly I think I’ll need numbers and percentages. I may need intersections (e.g., X lesson plans addressed (1) multimodal literacy and (2) elementary students). But in addition to numbers, I’m probably going to need to point to the related lesson titles or Inbox columns. A running tally wouldn’t be enough. It’s more complex than that. So, do I need a spreadsheet? a database? something else?
- A system to schedule and track Inbox topics and promotions for all the staff involved to use. Each week, I write the Ideas and blog and search for news. Some other folks on staff choose the final news stories. Once I know the focus, I pass that info along to the marketing staff, and in return, they send me details on the announcements for each week. I need to create some kind of schedule that allows for longer-range planning. Right now, most of this happens on Monday. I think I need a giant table with columns for strategic governance focus, likely current events, ideas focus, blog focus, and related announcements. Possibly breaking out the announcements by the different areas (conventions, books, journals, professional development, membership). Is it a giant, shared spreadsheet?
- A system for a learning log that documents info on publications, positions, policies, etc. that is used to inform RWT and Inbox work. As an example, what I need to do is read an article, position statement, or similar document and then log the details on that piece, noting how it might connect to specific issues. I think some kind of tagging or indexing is paramount. A sample note might be something like this:
“article name: rest of article name” from Journal Name explains how a teacher used small-group reading activities to explore the way dialects are represented in Huck Finn. Topics include literature, dialect, small groups, secondary, adolescent literacy, reading, Journal Name.
At first I thought I might need something like a hopped up and branded del.icio.us system that pointed to the Web pages for these things (they’ll all be on the Web in some way, though the public might only be able to get to abstracts). Now I’m wondering if it’s just a super blog with tags. Ideally, though, I’d need to be able to find intersections of tags (e.g., resources on secondary + literature). I don’t know that there’s any blog tool that does that. Hmm. I think it’s far more than a spreadsheet, and I think tracking all this on paper would be counter-productive. Maybe there’s some other tool that would do what I need.
So I need three miracle tools, ideally tools that are very simple to manage and set up. Hmm. Time to incubate for a while. Maybe the answers will come to me. At least I have some freewriting on what I need done.
Aug 12
By Traci GardnerUncategorized
must restart life tomorrow. need to repartition and reformat all aspects of existence. searching for install disks.
May 18
By Traci GardnerUncategorized
In today’s e-mail from NCTE’s Senior Editor on my book manuscript:
“Attached are the reviews of your MS. As you’ll see, they’re all positive (yay!), with varying amounts of suggestions for revision.”
Maybe I really and truly am an author!!! :-)
May 15
By Traci GardnerUncategorized
I have blundered into the problem with an open, online existence. How do you say the things that you need to when everyone is watching? How does an author control her readers?
Now I of all people know that you shouldn’t put things online that you’re not willing to let anyone in the world read. But there’s a difference between putting something out there for anyone to read and putting something out there with your name on it for anyone to read. But is an anonymous existence the same? What happens when you lose your readers? Does a text matter if no one reads it?
I planned to come home and write tonight, but I couldn’t figure out how. The more I think about it, the more silenced I feel by my circumstances. It’s been a very hard month, and I’m not sure whether the right thing to do is stand up and write the story or scrawl it away secretly. Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer.
Apr 26
By Traci GardnerUncategorized
- I love my brother-in-law as much as my brother. I’m sure I have for a long time, but I didn’t realize it consciously till 4/16.
- Feeling secure isn’t about locking all the doors. It’s about feeling I don’t have to and I’ll still be okay.
- I know what it’s like to have an asthma attack now, and I know that there are two Virginia state police officers who are the nicest men in the world. Thank you for taking care of me when I broke down with that asthma attack.
- I have learned that a poet’s words can give a community a path out of their sadness. I had no idea a poem could ever be adopted so thoroughly. Literature is a powerful thing.
- I found that I have compassion for a mass murderer. What he did was horrible, but I’m glad the Va Tech community found a place for a Hokie Stone for him in the memorial.
- I understand what it was like to want a gun. For a day, I wanted a gun, and I wanted to know how to shoot it to defend myself. [You're all safe; the feeling passed.]
- I still feel safe on campus. At 1:30 AM Friday, I was walking around by myself. I have not let someone take that away.
- There are times when knowing that everyone in my family is physically safe isn’t enough.
- I know which people in this vast world really care about me. They IMed or emailed on 4/16 to check on me. One of them even showed up outside my office building to give me a hug on the 17th. Some of them are still checking on me. Some people still haven’t said a word. The categories of who does and doesn’t care about me have become very transparent. [edit: This was misread as indicating that I have/had a list of names. I don't/didn't. 5/15/07]
- That I’ll never understand and I desperately want to know why.
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Hi, I’m Traci Gardner, known in most circles as Tengrrl. I’ve been exploring and writing about the best ways to teach composition using digital technology for over 20 years. You may have come here because you’re looking for my 
