Not Really an Excuse

I know it has been much too long since my last post. No excuses. I should be posting more.

But . . .

(you knew that was coming, right?)

Here's the thing. I am not exactly anonymous here, and sometimes I get to wondering how I can really write anything somewhat approximating my experiences without pissing off my bosses, embarassing my students, implicating my spouse, or just plain making myself look foolish.

When those feelings overwhelm (and really, when the only things I have to talk about are things that would .... see above) I tend to go into hibernation. Work hard. And not blog.

But I had a bit of a breakthrough today, so I thought I would blog about it.

I'm teaching an intensive weekend course starting tomorrow, and planning for the Friday evening and all day Saturday has taken up a GOOD CHUNK of my time lately. Even with all of the work I've put into planning for the class, I started thinking this afternoon that I'm going to end up teaching until noon on Saturday and then run out of things to do.

That's a bad feeling.

So I sat down today, got out my composition book, and did some writing/thinking about what would I want to know about research in writing instruction at the secondary level, if I were a student in my class? Boom. Massive amount of content that I can deliver, that my students can debate and discuss and use for their projects, and that I actually have material on in my office. Cool, huh?

Topics to be enlarged upon before tomorrow afternoon at 1:00:

*** Research on response to student writing
*** Research on grammar and the teaching of writing
*** Research on the process approach to writing instruction

Now I must buckle down.

Thanks for stopping by.