WHOA! I guess time flies when you're having fun, because I DEFINITELY would not have said that it's been over two weeks since my last post! A lot has happened in that time, too.

For one thing, Iris and I finished our days at Kanapaha [sniff, sniff]. The teacher rocked, the kids were cool, and I'm really loving the middle school thang. Our last lesson was pretty good, I think, and preparing it actually helped me to kind of answer one of the teaching questions I'd thought of, namely what can you do to turn students into solid descriptive writers. I had been thinking you could force it out of them, with guidelines for fail-safe analysis and a list of what to replace with what, but that really goes against my idea of what writing should be, of course. Then I was thinking you could offer them some examples, maybe of the teacher's own writing, but I'm afraid that if the teacher is not very careful with something like that, the students will just end up copying, or practically copying, which isn't really writing either, if that's all it comes to. But like I said, preparing that lesson (with a jump-start from our teacher in the form of that list of possibilities for the Show Not Tells) was instructive, and - surprise, surprise - a LOT of fun. We were pretty sure the kids would like it when we found that WE ourselves were having a great time trying to figure it all out, and it seems that we were right! I also think Allan was right (surprise surprise again ;-) in saying that wait time would have helped things stay a little calmer - but still, I'm pretty pleased with how it worked out.

I'm also pretty pleased with the way the conference worked out! I simply cannot believe how nifty the whole thing was, and the "Probster" showing up was 1) a big surprise and 2) totally, totally cool. I would sum it up on a scoreboard like this: Good Sessions - 6, Sessions Featuring a Shamelessly Self-Promoting Comic Strip Writer - 1; Nice People We Made Friends With - 6, Slimy Napoleon-Complex Wrestling Coach - 1; Good Glasses of Wine - several, Bad Glasses of Wine - only 1, and that's because it got spilled; New Conference-Addicts - 4 (one of whom's not even gonna be an English teacher!), New Conference-Phobics - definitely 0. We had a great time.

Unfortunately, I'm not quite as devoted a fan of our new practicum just yet. I think the students are probably very cool - and I'm not just saying that because I think all kids are naturally perfect or something; we actually talked to several of them... - but for a variety of reasons they are not showing that during work time. Anyway, we are of course glad just to be placed - what would happen if nobody would take us? [sob, sob] - and I find GHS particularly interesting, because it's a lot like my own high school, where I'm thinking about fishing around for a job, so for the time being that's all I'm going to say about that.

What else? I hammered out two essays yesterday in less than three hours, impressive compared to my much longer write-times in undergrad, so that's pretty cool. I'm still completely enthused about all my English proteach classes as well as the vast, vast majority of the other people in them. I'm forgetting less, remembering more, waking up on time but not snoring my way through my own classes, and even actually learning a few things here and there, so I'm thinking that I probably WILL make it as a teacher and even (yikes!) as a ph.d. student one of these days. Practice, practice, practice is part of what it takes, I guess.

Okay, I'm out of here - it's time to see if I can apply that speedier writing style to my, uh, assignments I need to work on. But they're assignments for NEXT week, of course... I'm no procrastinator.