1. Icing my shoulder is working. Today my right arm's range of motion and my reach increased. Areas around my shoulder that had been painful previously, didn't hurt today. Once again, when I am still, no pain. My guess is that the one small area that is tender is going to take some time to heal, so I will continue to ice it and not put undue demands on how I use my right arm. The whole situation felt much better today than it did, say, on Sunday evening when I wrecked on my bicycle.
2. Scott Shirk wrote me an email asking how he might become a better writer. In responding today, I had fun revisiting the ways I think about writing in relation to Thich Nhat Hanh's exploration of being and non-being in his book Being Peace. Writing this letter reawakened what I cared the most about when I was a writing instructor.
I don't know if I was right or not, but, as an instructor, I always thought that good writing was inseparable from the cultivation of inward freedom -- the freedom to see things in multiple ways, to explore connections between seemingly unrelated things, to be awake to the world's variety, and to exercise the freedom to write by letting it rip, trying to forget about grades and performance. I knew then and I know now that this wasn't a very academic approach. I also knew as our composition program became more preoccupied with assessing its own success, that I didn't possess a single objective means of measuring whether students who came to enjoy writing, felt free to let it rip, and who explored the world and their writing by exploring the copious nature of concepts, ideas, and experiences actually met the officially stated objectives of the writing courses.
I don't think I ever surrendered to the idea that such assessment was possible.
Retired, I don't miss assessment. I don't miss course objectives. I don't miss trying to meet those objectives while simultaneously resisting them.
I miss the experience of trying to cultivate freedom. I miss the laughter, fun, and joy some students experienced when they became less preoccupied with achievement and grades and discovered they often wrote better, in my view, when they quite trying so damn hard to write better and let it rip.
3. In preparation for a small crew coming to the house on Wednesday, June 12th, and cutting back the lilacs, I hired a junior at KHS to come over and use his weed eater to cut back all the growth around the lilacs in the rear of the back yard and to take what he mowed down off the premises. He did just what I asked and earned himself a little more money toward the work he wants done on his truck. I asked him if he pulled weeds or did he just remove them with his machine. I had a sense he didn't pull weeds and I was right. If I ever decide, though, that I'd like more weed whacking done, I'll get back in touch with him again. I'm very happy that the tree guys are going to have much easier access to the lilacs thanks to the work this high schooler did back there today.
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