i found the title that i thought i’d lost: writing assignments that work. i like the idea of the double meaning. of course, all i have is a title and depression and guilt about not writing anything.

how do i write? geez this is stupid. i mean i do write. i write all the time. it’s writing something with resources that has me confused. something big with resources actually. i write lesson plans all the time, and they have connections to resources. i usually have those resources lying all around me. i don’t think i’ve ever written notes or done much more than highlight phrases i want to use. often, i’ll just be writing and grab a book and choose something when i need it. i write and then find a resource. it’s not a matter of doing research into all the background and then writing.

well to be fair, i have done some research just not necessarily recently. i know that the activity is pedagogically sound. i know enough to give it general underpinnings. but i usually need to find a specific article or chapter to quote, and i rarely have that piece in advance. i have the resources near my computer, and i search for the specifics as i need them.

what does this tell me about longer pieces? maybe it’s partially about confidence. when i’m working on lesson plans, i just write. i feel as if i know what i’m doing. maybe it’s the fact that i’m trying to write a longer piece and i just fear that it needs to somehow be brilliant. i feel as if i need to know a million resources to figure out how to write anything suitable. maybe it’s that there is more information to manage and deal with. i can’t just choose a representative article and stick it in place. i need to have all the info.

this is all so very confusing. i can’t haul all these books and articles about. maybe a small database is the best way to organize notes, but surely that’s not how most people write. of course most people don’t wait 18 years between documents. i so need to figure this out…

so I’ve been spending days trying to figure out how i write. i know that sounds insane, but the thing is that i’m trying to figure out what i do with all these resources and references sitting around—do i have to carry all these books from place to place? do i photocopy the pertinent pages and carry those around? do i scan the pages? do i write out notes? what do i do?

somehow, inexplicably, stupidly, i can’t remember how i write anything that doesn’t just spring from my own whimsy. how did i forget how to write? when i wrote my thesis and papers and such many eons ago, i used notecards. i still have all my notecards ordered and banded together in card boxes. i wrote things out from the books in longhand on the cards. and i remember in some situations i typed the quotations or photocopied them and then taped them onto notecards. then i’d take the note card and arrange them in piles, based on whatever it was they supported or helped with. all that was for secondary stuff i think. i think that the poems or plays or novels that i was working with i just carried with me. i’m a big-time annotater. lots of notes in the book and lists of page numbers on the covers and endpages.

so i’ve been thinking am i supposed to do that? do i copy everything out on notecards? surely that’s insane. first it’s a waste of time cuz everything would need typed eventually, and second, my carpal tunnel would never allow it. i have endnote. i could try to type it all in there, but it doesn’t really seem suited to typing in notes. maybe annotation, but not extensive quotations. i’ve thought about creating a database and typing all my notes in there. creating my own online database. is that really how to do this? i keep wondering too if i can trust my notes. i mean will i catch everything or will i still need to carry all these books around to write.

i feel like i don’t even know how to write anymore and i don’t know when i forgot.

Harry Potter Personality Quiz by Pirate Monkeys Inc.

i am exceptionally tired of crashing my machine with a frozen printer spooler.

just finished a lesson plan on summer reading, which doubles as a lesson plan on persuasive writing.

i must have a zillion things on the desk that i need to get through. feedback would be so much easier if writers were all at the same place. with so many submissions in so many different places in the system, i’m feeling very scattered.

so inspired by my failure to finish things, I finished a list of ten on informative writing prompts and i think i’ve updated my online vita to include everything.

now i get to figure out what they changed in blogger and try to decipher the teeny tiny new fonts they’re labeling things with (someone should have tested this on a mac). at least i have harry potter to keep me company.

well, i gave up on that javascript and turned my attention to coming up with a proposal that will get me to MTU this summer. as a result, i had to look at all the stuff that i’ve started and not managed to finish. i so need to focus. you’d think that i’d manage to finish something.

do you ever go through all those old files you saved from when you were teaching, say, 10 years ago? i was looking for what i thought was a persuasive writing assignment this evening. it turned out to be an analytical/classification paper. what i found was more interesting though. i realized that before i ever knew what things like technological literacy and student-centered pedagogy were i was focusing on them in the classroom. okay, sure, i found some very odd and embarrassing stuff—we all have strange grammar exercises stashed away somewhere don’t we? i’ve managed to save piles of copies of things too. apparently at some point, i thought that i’d use that same peer review sheet or sample essay or invention exercise again; so i saved all the extra copies. going through this pile of stuff, somehow, i still couldn’t part with all the extras (or the grammar exercises). i’m not sure exactly what i need them for, but it feels a bit like an archive that i shouldn’t change. besides there’s proof in there that i knew things before i knew i knew them :)

well, i tried to figure out how to set up my archive links here so that only the four most recent show and you can control the order (most recent first or last). i thought that i followed the instructions on the Blogger archive script generator carefully. the result did create links, but unfortunately, they all read “undefined NaN”—not exactly the result I was hoping for :( Oh well. Maybe someone on techrhet will understand.


today, i edited and coded a readwritethink lesson plan on newspapers and short stories. other than that, i spent time trying to catch up on the odds and ends from being out of the office. and i had to spend some quality time with Stanley. he gets so crabby when he’s left alone in the tank with no human to beg for food. poor fishie.