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Pedagogy, Philosophy, and Nonsense Home Essays and Links Creative Non-Fiction The Dawn, the Dark, and the Horse I Didn't Ride in On (an odd, philosophical, semi-romantic meandering) The Mug, the Magic, and the Mistake Trumpet Player, USDA Approved Writing and Education A Major is More Minor Than You Think Thoughts About Picking a Major Reading Poetry and Cloud Watching What's the Subject of a Class? Why Write? Legos, Power, and Control Writing and Einstein: The Difference Between Information and Meaning Writing and the Goldilocks Dilemma Something Somewhat Vaguely Like a Resumé POETRY My Other Related Sites: Showing Class: Writing by Current and Former Students
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Thoughts About Writing, Education, and Experience ginfor@earthlink.net |
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Seeing patterns in the world around us may be much like cloud watching. If we look long enough and squint just right, we can see whatever we want. Or it may be more like a Rorschach test, and what we see in the world reveals how we think the world works. Whether we think it's random or carefully controlled, one pattern we have to cope with is change. I accept that. It's just that I've noticed a possible pattern in some of the changes in my world lately, and it has me feeling a touch paranoid. My Little League baseball days are far in the past and just as well left there. The field where I played became "the old Little League field" when a new park was built in another part of town, and even that change came long ago. I thought nothing of it when the old field and surrounding land were purchased and a large Catholic church went up. I've never been inside the church, but from the outside, it looks like the altar might sit right above where I sometimes daydreamed in right field when not sitting on the bench. Of course, it seemed unlikely that the church was built simply to mark that spot. Many years after the church was built, I was driving near another location with some personal significance about 100 miles away. Nostalgia was strong enough to get me off the interstate to drive by a small motel, the type that covered the landscape across the U.S. before the interstate system took over. It was in that utterly clichéd spot that other forces overcame my shyness and my virginity. It all happened behind the red door of room 7 with a large matador on velvet on the wall behind the bed. The night fell more into slapstick than romance but was no less important for that. This time, the Baptists got the land, and room 7 is probably more under the parking lot than the altar. Two incidents don't make a pattern, and I'm not really paranoid enough to believe there's an organized attempt to cover my past. I suppose this is more about learning to cope with randomness, change, and perspective. My life, like most, has not been such that history will care about where I struck out or where I didn't. On the other hand, the person I shared room 7 with later got married at the right field altar and wasn't even Catholic, so I may just keep watching for a mosque or Buddhist temple going up over the tennis courts or in the field on one particular country road. -------------------------------------------------- Contact, Converse, Critique, Question
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Would you like to know when the site gets updated? Drop me an e-mail, and I'll add you to the list. Much of my writing has been for the antiques site lately, but I have a long list of essays in assorted stages of revision for this site. The people who e-mail often apologize because they assume I'm swamped with e-mails. I only wish it were true. I'm a teacher from the marrow out, so give me questions. I'm a writer, so I also need an audience. Sometimes that means applause, sometimes rotten tomatoes. From time to time, a student decides to use some of my ideas, or perhaps they even quote me in a paper. Great, I'll take what fame and traces of immortality I can get. However, I should also warn such students that my ideas are not always the things that your teachers want to hear. I'm a stubborn idealist, and that puts me at odds with quite a bit of education theory and literary criticism. Sure, I think I'm right about some things, and I'm sometimes convinced of my own brilliance, but don't jump into the fire blindfolded. FDP |