Well, I am feeling pretty accomplished for the moment. I'm finished with everything for Monday and Tuesday, will soon be done with what I need for Wednesday [ :-P ], and don't see a problem with getting what's left for Thursday taken care of. I'm even thinking ahead: contemplating what I'll do for "Book Fair", trying to come up with a pre-writing microteaching for a couple of weeks from now, and figuring out some items to include on my questionnaire for the Language Exploration Project. Amazing. (I need to catch up on my journals, but hey, what are you gonna do.)

The biggest thing I got done today was finishing With Rigor For All, which I liked very much. I had some issues with the author's comments about YA stuff, and I still don't want to say as she does that "classics", even though that's a very inclusive category for Jago, are the only good way to inspire students to ask questions and make connections, but overall I'm happy with her argument. This is kind of like the way I felt about that Delpit article: I was displeased with some of her supporting points, but I agree with her specific purpose.

A professor I had once told our class that "expanding where you're 'at home' is an expansion of your soul". Even though that was offered as an overarching concept for the course rather than something specific to memorize, I wrote it down. It really captured my own overarching concept as I had never particularly thought to do, and I find that it is applicable in almost every arena - the middle- or high-school class I'll be teaching included. That, for me, is a better reason to get kids to learn Standard Written English along with all kinds of dialects, as Delpit would like, than to tell them that they should do it because Whitey said so. Let's show them that they can make their capacity to express themselves bigger when they have more ways to do it, and that this doesn't take the place of what they did before but adds to it. (Actually, capacity is probably the wrong word, because it implies holding, while a finer ability to express is just the opposite.) It's a better reason to include the classics in everybody's curriculum ALONG with YA and lots of other stuff. Let's help kids see how much is out there, because the more they know the more connections they can make, and the better they know where they are. Reading classics doesn't have to alienate people; it can make them even more than what they were before.

Both the inclusion of SWE along with dialects and classics along with YA are really just little pushes toward making students "at home" in more places. But being at home is bigger than that. In fact, I think it's HUGE. It works on a variety of concrete and abstract planes. It works in school, social life, relationships, culture, music, you name it. Doing things to become at home makes people bigger, more thinking, more experienced, more empathetic. Doing things to become at home, I think, makes people happier. And that is really what I want to do with my students.