091018 so lonely so lonely so lonely so loney what? I’m fine. it’s just a song jeez. Or “Geeze” as celi spelled it in one of her typewritten missives. millie’s obsessed with how many cookies are in which tupperware. she is good hearted but just rigid and single minded enough that I’m afraid she’s going to have a bit of trouble with human relationiships. you come into the room and she’s already in the middle of a long series of thoughts, an extended hypothetical conversation, a middle word of which she suddenly peppers you with as you brush aside the curtain and walk, blinking in the too much light she’s blasted the area with so she can loudly make eggs, and you’re like what? i don’t know? because all you wanted to do was walk to the bathroom on the invisible morning line; you didn’t want to interact or react or even be witnessed yet, because you didn’t do your fifteen minutes yet, and you’re nervous as the smell of raw crayons for the school day, and so when she says INSTANTLY as you have only taken the first couple of closed-eyed (because the light is so so bright) steps through the kitchen, “Wait. Did you put *all* the cookies in there?” all you can do is mumble “In where? I don’t know,” and wish you’d had the wherewithal to get up immediately instead of pressing snooze twice, because then you’d be done with your fifteen minutes, and it would have had a chance to be “about” something other than the mundane drudgery of home and hearth. It could have been about the dream, or the elephant, or the lonely, or the crayon, or the whatever it is that comes up out of the dark and swirls around you as you’re half awake anything at all that’s not nonsense, I have to remind myself that it’s OK if this is boring and doesn’t “turn into” anything. I don’t have to tell stories. I don’t have to be a genius. I don’t have to accidentally compose small gems, a small line of tiny dewdrops of brilliance, studding the edge of consciousness like water droplets lined up along a delicate blade of grass. While the schoolday sun burns off the fog in groggy fury. So let me tell you what i DON’T want to do: 1) think of “featured reading strategies” for RC. Solution: just check your glow-worms and stuff, check your reading strategies folder, and check that document we made last year in the staff meetings. Just pick a few. It’s not that big a deal. You can later incorporate them into other classes if they work well, and then you’ll have something to talk about during those annoying extra meetings we have scheduled this year to talk to admin about reading strategies, you know, the meetings that got Schlitt so peeved that she sat there, prairie dog erect, and protested for like fifteen minutes in our last staff meeting, and got others riled up to join in the fray as well, because we’re good at nothing so much as having a spicy conversation when the topic is how we have too much work and don’t want to do any more. 2) go into detail about how to do the AVID assignments, because it’s going to be a pain in the ass to go through all the curriculum files and figure out how to adapt it all and how to explain it in the assignment description, and make all the DECISIONS about how it’s going to work and how to rationalize it. Solution: you’re just going to have to do it. Do two this week and then at least one every subsequent week and you should sort of be OK. Also refer to your brilliant emails to self and incorporate some fun game twists and alternatives during any week where it all starts to seem a little grim and dismal and arbitrary. If it’s arbitrary anyway, might as well make it a little bit fun, yeah? I had a nice analogy while trying to teach Megan about parts of speech and how to answer her teacher’s weirdly specific (and speaking of arbitrary) question about “how do the verbs and verbals contribute to the mood of the passage” (I mean, why just the verbs and verbals? The passages she picked, only one of them really had a cohesive connotation among that particular set of words; the other two were all over the map!) But anyway, here was the thing: look at all those words you underlined—picture them as a color palette. Like when you select a certain set of markers vs a different set, depending on what mood you’re trying to evoke in your picture; she said it was hard, I said you’re just not used to it. Got to learn to see words as different colors. That’s what connotation is.