because i have been decorating the window at work, along with help from my MarcoPolo friends Lisa and Sharon, i’ve been exploring all the parameters of Duck’s campaign for president. as a public service to our coworkers, we’ve been posting information about the three candidates for this year’s election: Bush, Kerry, and Duck.

Duck is the best for the job. Vote Duck!

     (@_                    _@)
  \\\_\                      /_///
  <____) DUCK FOR PRESIDENT (____>

                Show Your Support!

i feel exceptionally writing challenged today. i can’t seem to think of a single, original idea. I can type notes, but that’s about it. course, that’s just copying. anyone could copy.

ok. so that was a waste. all i can write is crap:

Writing assignments that work is the key to success in any class. Students can survive a lot of missteps, but if the assignments that we send students off to complete do not provide them with the details that they need, their success is more likely to be the result of chance than accomplishment.

what hogwash. i feel like i don’t know how to write anything anymore. how do i start? can i just dive into the middle? should i be writing a list of ten? figuring out how i want to reformat them? geesh. i feel so lost, and i’ve only been trying to write for a few minutes now.

so here i spent all this time trying to figure out how to do index cards online. looking for special software, avery labels, something. anything.

in desperation last week, as i was packing for my yearly trip to houghton, i needed to decide whether or not to pack the index cards. had to give it one more try, and as my last try i thought i’d see if i could configure something in Word that would work. go to Word, and find that there’s a 8×5 card layout already there, built in. even on my old copy of word on my poor old ibook.

silly me. i think i got derailed by the idea of trying to find a technology solution, some new way to do what i used to do. really, what i should have been doing was spending my time doing what i knew worked. i would have gotten to the same place much more quickly.

i think that i’ll still use endnote for the bib citations, because i have to do something. they need to be written, and why not let software do it for me since i know how to use it and don’t need anything too complex. and after all, mla has changed, so i’d have to look up the rules if i wrote it all out by hand.

so now i’m sitting here in houghton, needing to get started on my writing. much reading and notetaking and writing and rewriting to do. unfortunately, i don’t think i have anything that i need with me right now. on the other hand, i don’t really feel like wandering off to find something. by the time i chose something and came back, it would be time to leave again.

i guess that it’s that point in the writing process when i have to look at my collected notes that are online and figure out what i have that i can keep. maybe it’s time for some freewriting. or something of that sort.

I think that I used notecards for my papers and whatnot as a student as a
physical arrangement tool more than anything else. Especially for larger
documents like my master’s thesis, I was able to write out quotations and
such on cards and then physically move them about—one pile for the
historical background, another for the description of the manuscript,
another for literary influences, etc. I even used different sizes and
colors. I think the bib citations were all on 3 by 5 cards, maybe 4 by 6.
My notes were all on bigger cards (8 by something?).

The cards gave me the opportunity to move ideas around and sort them
easily, and as I’m typing this, I’m wondering if things would have been
different if I had grown up knowing that it was easy to move ideas around
and sort them digitally. Then it might not have been such a big deal to be
able to arrange and stack notecards.

I’m sure it’s a sign of something horrible to say that also there’s just
something intriguing about a pile of notecards for me. It feels like an
accomplishment to have a large pile of cards. Hmm. It also occurs to me
that when I took programming classes originally, it was back in the era of
punchcards. Even then I was arranging and sorting cards.

Maybe this is why I feel so confused and lost now. In my practice, long
papers are written by sorting things out on cards. The writing that I do
with sources now is, I’m guessing, 99% very focused. No need to sort
anything around or about. Hmm. Maybe I am getting somewhere. At least I
know why I feel so confused about notecards and working without them.
Part of the problem for me now is that because of carpal tunnel issues, I’d
never survive handwriting notecards. Maybe it’s time to figure out how to
send notecards through the printer :)

so here i am going through various piles of papers and file folders that have piled up over the last several weeks, and I find a folder from cccc 1999. i knew that it had my presentation in it, and I’d been shifting it around because I intend to type it up but never get around to it. not overly exciting, but it was a pain to research (i calculated statistics on the appearance of computer words in cccc programs) so i felt like i should put it out there.

i pull out the papers in the folder, and i find a draft document, “Guidelines for the Use of Computer Technologies in Technological Literacy Initiatives.” at first, i thought that i’d dropped the ball on something. i glance over it, and it’s nicely done. looks very smart. where did it come from? i look further, and i find the handwritten notes. it’s my text. i wrote this thing and shared the draft in Atlanta and then never finished it.

i’m always amazed when i find texts like this. it doesn’t happen often. i have this strong, smart voice. so strong and so smart in this draft that i was certain it wasn’t mine. and yet, the handwritten copy proves that it is. i look at it and wonder where that person came from and what on earth suggested to her that she could write that kind of text five years ago.

maybe i oughta finish it and put it online now, if only i can that that smart girl with the strong voice again.

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.