Writing Goals: Jumpstart Edition

Published January 26, 2012 by Jackie

One technique that works for me in goal-setting is making sure I have some concrete tasks to check off as I make progress, in addition to larger conceptual themes. In keeping with my writing jumpstart program, here are my specific writing goals for 2012:

If you notice, there’s a pattern here having to do with submissions, my most-dreaded portion of the writing life. Trying to do the whole tackling-it-head-on thing.

Just as with my other resolutions, I’ll be posting when I have success in meeting these goals too.

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Jumpstarting My Writing

Published January 25, 2012 by Jackie
The keyboard of the Malling-Hansen writing bal...

Image via Wikipedia

As important as writing is to me, and as central as it is to my identity and conception of myself, when something has to drop from my daily juggling act, too often, it’s writing. So for 2012, I’m determined to jumpstart my trajectory as a writer and poet. This is a broader goal, not a concrete one, which means I need to think creatively about how to accomplish it and what that might look like, and what the steps toward success might be.

Thanks to my poet friend Christine Stewart, I’ve got some specific ways to get started on reinvigorating my writing routines. As always, Chris has a pile of fun, creative and reflective ways to start thinking about this, so I’m feeling inspired to get started. Right now, I’m thinking my theme will be “commitment,” in line with my determination to shuffle writing higher on my priority list as often as I can.

Another interesting exercise I’m planning to try is inspired by this post of Penelope Trunk’s on things she wishes she had written, and what that told her not only about her dreams for her writing career, but about the accompanying emotions each evoked in her. As provocative and disturbing as Trunk can often be, I also find her writing to frequently be insightful and inspiring, and this entry was a great example. I often think I’d like to have written some of the many amazing Dear Sugar columns, for example (the one on your invisible inner terrible someone blows me away every time I read it), but I don’t aspire to being an advice columnist, per se, so what is it exactly about Sugar’s writing that I’d like to emulate? I think it’s not only her eloquence, but her candor and compassion, so how can I incorporate those threads into my work?

Finally, I sat down and drafted a list of specific writing goals for the year, which I’ll share in an upcoming post.  In the past, I made lists of broader goals, but I didn’t find those to be motivating as I would like, so I’m working on a specific list, as those seem to be more effective for me.

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Random Bullets of Grading Exams

Published January 23, 2012 by Jackie
  • Reason 14,950 I love teaching freshmen: they write me little notes in the margins of their exams, with exclamation points and smiley faces, and make little jokes about the questions and their answers
  • Quandary #1: if my students do very well, on average, on a section of their exam, is it because they studied effectively, I taught it effectively, or I mistakenly wrote the questions as to be too easy?
  • Related: one of the many aspects of teaching that is much harder than people realize is the art of writing a useful exam, one that is sufficiently rigorous but within a well-prepared student’s reach. I find writing essay topics much easier.
  • Quandary #2: is it fairest to put all students in the same type of testing environment–sitting in chairs at desks, no music, fluorescent lights, no snacks, in groups of 15-50 other test-takers–or would it be fairest to let them choose a few conditions they’d prefer to have during testing, and them group them in different locations accordingly?
  • Even though I am completely convinced that it would be incredibly ineffective for my particular subject, sometimes I still wish I could do my whole exam on Scantron.  This usually happens when I’m faced with a fresh stack of exams, oddly enough.
  • I’ve never been the kind of teacher who collects all the exams and then sits right down to grade them; I usually take a break after the stress of exam week and semester’s end. However, this year, the English exam was the last in the week’s schedule, so my grading window is uncomfortably short.
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Purging My Books

Published January 17, 2012 by Jackie

This weekend, I began Phase One of a larger decluttering project: purging our enormous collection of books over the coming year. This is the kind of project my mother has been hounding me to do for years, and one I’ve tackled in smaller ways before, but am committed to following through on this time. Here are the steps, as I see them:

  • There are four major locations in our house where we have collections of books: each of the three bedrooms we use, as well as the front room downstairs, which we call the “piano room” but I also think of as our library, and was probably called the “parlor” a century ago when the house was built.
  • Each of these locations needs to be tackled individually to sort out which books are no longer necessary.
  • These books then need to be gathered up and dropped off at the Baltimore Book Thing.
  • Auxiliary locations must be addressed: the kitchen shelf with my cookbooks on it, the box of books I suspect is lurking in the basement, my classroom shelves.
  • Bookshelves should be cleaned/dusted.
  • Any unshelved books need to be shelved.

First up was the piano room, which I began while my husband shouted at the Ravens-Houston football game and my kids played upstairs.  In earlier purges, I’ve targeted novels I never liked or will never read, as well as graduate school texts I will never use again, but this time, I found myself being able to eliminate even more categories.  A lot of my parenting books are gone now, the ones about babyhood, toddlerhood, raising little girls and new motherhood, and I winnowed my graduate school books down even further.  At this point, I’ve got a laundry basket full of books, as well as three heavy black trash bags, all ready to be set free, back into the world.  I dusted all the shelves (or at least, the fronts of them and the tops of the remaining books), and did a purge of knickknacks while I was at it.  There are some piles of books on my bedroom floor, so my next goal is to move them all downstairs in the hopes that they will fit on the downstairs shelves now.  Sometimes I think about sorting the library shelves by category, but I just don’t think I’m organized enough to maintain that!

Purging my books has been hard for me in the past, and it’s still a daunting task, but I felt calmer about it this time, and it was much easier to let go.  Looking at titles about raising two-year-olds, I knew that part of my life was over, and if I ever do another graduate degree, I have a much better sense about what it will or won’t include.  As my life has gotten more focused, I think my personal library has too, and that seems like a good thing.

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Reducing Screen Time: Strategies

Published January 11, 2012 by Jackie
English: A child watching TV.

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One of the resolutions I’ve made for 2012 that is most daunting for me is to reduce screen time. This has been an ongoing desire of mine, but I’ve not yet found the strategies that work for me. Here’s a list of some I’m considering:

  • keeping a screen time log for myself for a week (I expect this to be horrifying, which is probably exactly why I should do it)
  • setting some get-active goals and tracking my progress
  • eating dinner in front of the TV less (I know, it’s a horrible habit and bringing the end of Western civilization closer and closer)
  • being active during screen time, including doing stretches or lifting weights while watching TV. I think using screen time for active Wii games would be a good switch here too.
  • cutting down on the most purposeless/time-suck ways I am on the Internet.  Blogging is okay, stupid gossip websites are less so.  And specifically, maybe check those embarrassing sites once a day, but no more.
  • I think it would also be helpful to make a list of “good” uses of screen time: blogging, Family Movie Night, shows like “Top Chef” I enjoy watching with my girls, and let myself off the hook for those.
  • accepting that I don’t need constant access to my inboxes and that sometimes, emails can wait until later to be answered. I don’t think I could fall asleep without checking my work email in the late evening at least once, but I certainly don’t need to check as often as I do.

The big piece will be focusing on myself; I think I do fairly well in monitoring my children’s consumption and screen hours, as well as keeping screens out of the bedrooms, but my own habits have gotten untenable. I don’t have a smartphone, which I think is good for me, but my laptop is on far too often, and too often I’ve got the TV on in the background as well.

Blech. I know this isn’t a new insight, but I really think one of the road blocks to keeping resolutions is that trying to be a better person also means acknowledging all the ways in which you fall short, and who wants to think about that for too long?

Newsflash: resolutions also often involve stopping doing things that are easy, and replacing with things that are hard.  Sigh.

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Resolution Check-In

Published January 10, 2012 by Jackie

Laura at Geeky Mom just did a resolution check-in that inspired me to do my own, so here goes:

  • clean out the basement and buy a chest freezer: no progress at all, but to be fair, this was always a summer/spring break project
  • go to a poetry reading and join a poetry group: no reading plans, but have been in talks with a friend about a group, and it looks like it is moving forward
  • write 100 blog posts: I’ve written four so far, not including this one, which I think is doing well for less than two weeks into the year
  • go to the beach: again, not on tap for January!
  • reduce screen time: no progress at all.  Must develop some concrete strategies for tackling this one: post coming soon.
  • exercise more: I walked home from school once so far, which is 1.5 miles, and I have investigated a Pilates class I’d like to try, as well as inherited Wii Fit Plus with Balance Board from a friend. I also did a Just Dance session, which I enjoyed and am willing to count as light cardio. Not great, but not too bad.
  • finish War and Peace: no progress at all
  • write poetry: today I wrote a title, which I’m counting as progress.  Have a deadline coming up, so need to get moving on this.
  • keep a teaching journal: no progress, because I can’t find the one I bought specifically for this purpose and am frustrated with myself about it. Must resolve somehow.
  • spend more time with friends: so far this is probably my most successful resolution! I went for drinks and nachos with my fellow Girl Scout leaders and out for dinner and drinks this past weekend to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Already have plans for this coming weekend with a work colleague!
  • declutter: have bagged up some kitchen things, did some decluttering work in my bedroom today and was inspired by reading Laura’s strategies: only working for fifteen minutes at a time, and starting at the front of the house and working towards the back. My next step is to make a list of clutter flashpoints in my house and then tackle them one by one.

I think I’ll check in again in early February and only focus on the resolutions I’m currently working on, not the summer-dedicated ones.  Wish me luck!

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Vocabulary Videos

Published January 9, 2012 by Jackie
Ideas are ...

Image by martymadrid via Flickr

As part of our midterm review, I’m revamping what I’ve done before; I’ve had students do review presentations before, but this year, I stepped up the requirements to make it more creative and interactive and truly substantial. I gave them a few examples and two class periods to work and then set them loose!

So far, I’ve got one group working on “Edge of Glory: Vocab Remix,” one group pounding oranges with a mallet, another group taking a camera out to the field, and another covering my whiteboard with a millefleur pattern. As fun as this all looks, there’s also sound pedagogical reasoning behind it, aligned with the idea of scaffolding and the gradual release model of shifting from teacher to student responsibility for learning. I also feel like this is appropriate 21st century, Teach Paperless learning, as they use their laptops, cell phones and flip cameras to produce their work, and I’m planning to make the materials from all three sections available on my website, which will provide the bulk of their grammar/vocab review for the midterm exam.

I often feel impatient when I read a good teaching article, and want to implement that idea right now! This gets overwhelming quickly and can be really discouraging as well, thinking of all the amazing things other (better) teachers are doing while you’re struggling through lessons that seem unimaginative at best. Too many ideas end up lingering in my files, never to be implemented. However, I’m finding that more often, I have to let an idea incubate over a period of time, until I can integrate it into my classes in the most effective way.

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The Secret Garden

Published January 6, 2012 by Jackie

One of our Christmas family traditions is that everyone gets books, and this year, one of the books for our girls was The Secret Garden. I thought it was a natural next step after we enjoyed A Little Princess, and so far, it’s paying off. We’re five or six chapters in now; we haven’t met Dickon yet, and we just heard the mysterious cry in the corridor.

5:365 The Secret Garden

Image by openuser via Flickrson

We took some time off from family bedtime reading last year, and I’m so glad we have gotten back into the rhythm, even though my girls are old enough to not only put themselves to bed, but stay up late reading themselves. I don’t know how long it will last, my girls and I snuggled on the couch under soft blankets, laughing and gasping and asking questions. But I’ve got Little Women ready to go next, and I’m treasuring these times together.

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Twitter, One Year Later

Published January 5, 2012 by Jackie
Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...

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A year ago, I succumbed to my curiosity and joined Twitter, despite deciding six months previously that it wasn’t for me. Since then, I’ve tweeted over 800 times and follow more than 110 people, and have over 50 followers myself, which are tiny numbers in the grand scheme of things, but also show, I think, that I must have gotten some value out of it in that year.

I thought I would end up sending a bunch of links and things there, but ultimately, I still send most of that to FB, where I get more responses and communal dialogue. I publicize my blog entries there, but I think FB is a bigger referrer still.

As part of making my overall screen time more purposeful, as well as eliminating my biggest online time-sucks, I am looking closely at areas where I can cut down.

My questions about Twitter:

What do I like about it?

keeping in touch with friends who use it a lot, informal one-to-one conversations, live-tweeting events like the Republican debates, useful links, keeping up with West Wing characters!

What is not enjoyable about it?

It’s fairly addictive in the same way that Facebook is for me, because it’s almost a guarantee that every time I check it, there will be something new to look at, making it a very easy distraction. Luckily, like FB, it’s blocked while I am at school, but unluckily, that means it’s one of my biggest time-sucks while here at home, which I’m trying to eliminate.

Am I ready to make it public? How would that benefit me?

Not being public means I’m not part of bigger conversations, which sometimes I think I’d like to be, and also not being public means it’s the only corner of the Internet where I don’t have that accountability that I prize everywhere else. Before I made it public, I’d have to go through and carefully edit my previous Tweets, which would be tedious, as there are over 800 of them (also, are Tweets ever really deleted? Is anything?).

I think it’s useful enough to stay invested, but I think making myself more accountable for how I use it would be healthier too.

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