welcome!
let's begin
the way transformations do,
with questions.
why a blog?
i am by no means the sort inclined to keeping a blog. i'm a sometime technophobe. i'm deeply undisciplined. but most importantly, for roughly the same reasons i'm a poet out of water in a poetry slam. writing has always been - for me - a very private art, a means to express what has not been or cannot be spoken.
at its worst i saw blogging and similar practices as a kind of electronic prostration before a mutually narcissistic audience of people who should possibly have been out running barefoot in the grass instead.
so what am i doing here? at the simplest and deepest level, i wanted a way to share my new experiences with my family - both those i was born with and those who happen to populate my intimate world. teaching is a very personal profession. it needs YOU, & it changes you. after one short, intense week spent immersed in discussion of the theories and realities of urban/human schoolteaching, i am filled with ideas, excitement, impressions, and new & critical knowledge. i am bursting with stories!
but the short and intense first week reminds me that the summer and coming school year will be both physically and emotionally exhausting. in such a state i am sometimes unable to give such stories their due passion, perhaps especially in multiple tellings, and this deprives us both.
this, finally: there are so many incredibly important people i simply do not communicate wih enough. perhaps you might even say that my desire to share this world with you is in its way an act of love.
it's late. i've got to head toward sleep. i missed the sign on the door to the teacher's college that said "Night Owls Need Not Apply." sweet dreams, comrades.
N.B. at this point you're wondering whether i'll use this kind of dense & tortuous language with my kids - and the answer is obviously no (well, maybe sometimes). we all speak not one but many languages, and we possess them each in varying degrees. this is my language of reflection, which sometimes possesses me.
