Saturday, July 30, 2005

Llamas, Tigers, and Ducks


My wife is out of town for a week, so the kids and I went to the zoo this morning. It was probably the single most impressive visit I've ever made to any zoo. The tigers (a mother and two "teen-age"? cubs) were frisky. Wrestling. Pouncing on one another. Chasing. Even, at times, standing up on their hind legs swatting at one another like sparring partners. In the truest sense of the word, it was quite awesome.

Of course, when we got home (after a trip through McDonald's), I asked my kids about their favorite things at the zoo. My son (3) informed me he didn't have one. My daughter (5) rattled off the following list:

  • the mama duck with chicks that ran across the rhino's pen.
  • feeding the ducks and swans.
  • the duck that half bit her finger while she was feeding it.

No tigers. No bears. Not even the llama-like creatures getting it on while all the parents snickered nervously and the children asked "Why is he making that noise?"

My daughter, the more conversant of the two kids, then asked me about my favorite thing, at which time I reminded them about the tigers. Her reply was, "Oh, yeah."

The conversation got me thinking about the extent to which learning is often serendipitous. My kids may never see tigers playing so actively at any other point in their lives, and chances are they won't remember this moving sight. Had the event occurred five years from now, the impact may have been different. Similarly, I've heard folks say of any number of novels, "You have to be at a certain point in your life to really enjoy it." While I suspect that line is often used as some combination of excuse and encouragement, I also suspect that there can be some truth in it.

The point I guess, is this: The feeling I had today with my children was not entirely unlike the feeling I sometimes get with my first-year composition courses. Some of the students are "ready." The events in their lives have brought them to a place where they are receptive to and appreciative of the discoveries and the challenges and the rewards of writing. Others--even while academically and intellectually prepared--see the course as a hoop to jump through. (Perhaps because we've framed it that way?) Certainly, I was in these same shoes as an undergraduate. In such instances, I find myself wishing for something along the lines of a "ghost of Christmas future," some way to provide a bit of perspective that hasn't yet been generated in the course of one's life to date.

gad

Friday, July 29, 2005

The Funk

Okay, this isn't going to be much of a post. I've been dealing with some sort of funk for the last three days--coughing, intermittent fever. Not debilitating, but bad enough that all I want to do is sleep.

The last three days were supposed to be spent scraping my house in preparation for a new paint job, and engaging in the blogging phase of the DWP E-Writing Marathon, and finishing up some comments for an independent study that I'm overseeing at the moment. I've done little of any, and I've found myself thinking some about my students, their illnesses and absences, and my reactions to them. I simply don't remember being sick very often when I was an undergrad, and after the last three days, I'm quite thankful for that. Combine this funk with my 20-year-old-self and a 16 credit hour load, and I think it's fair to say that I would be just about ready to make my run on Jeopardy.

gad

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Dakota Writing Project Electronic Writing Marathon

Well after nearly three months without posting to this blog, I should have a flurry of activity over the course of the next week. In the summer of 2004, I began my association with the Dakota Writing Project, an affiliate of the National Writing Project. This summer, I'm helping to facilitate an "electronic writing marathon," a six-week opportunity for teachers in the DWP network to explore various electronic writing media and their potential applications for pedagogy.

This week, our focus is on blogs, so I'll be posting at least three times in the next few days. (I'm going to try to prevent this initial post from being one of the three.) Hopefully this flurry will spill over into the rest of the year ahead.

gad