ELE and I have decided to contribute our thoughts to the interwebs on a more regular basis. This should be pretty easy to accomplish since our last blog post was August. Yes, that was 10 months ago. And by "our," I really mean "her." I wanted little to nothing to do with blogging or "our" blog back then. So what changed since last August?
Everything.
Not quite, but we've had a lot going on. Part of my newly found motivation is that I have way too many thoughts floating around in my head to remember them all now, and some of them are important enough that I would like to. I love TRE more than I could have imagined, but I think he is making me dumber. There is so.much.more to think about when you have children that I forget half of what I'm trying to do. ELE can tell you all about how frustrating that is. My early adventures in fatherhood were probably enough to start my brain decay, but combining them with a job transition is apparently stressing me out so much that I want to write. That's a strange thing for a math teacher, but not something that scares me. I have my dad to thank for that.
My parents did an amazing job supplementing and supporting my education at home. I wish all of my students had parents like them. They can still recite Dr. Suess' ABCs, we practiced spelling list after spelling list, and when I brought home my first C+ on a progress report early in sophomore year, they didn't blame the teacher or demand a conference... they called the cable company. Anyone want to guess how many over-the-air channels you get when your house is buried in the woods of eastern Connecticut and within walking distance of a place called Mansfield Hollow State Park?
Are you done applauding them yet?
Honestly, I took to school well so I think they had it pretty easy. But there was one thing that I remember generally hating: writing. I tried anything to get out of it, so one of my most consistent memories throughout my school years is my dad stressing the importance of being able to communicate effectively in writing. It shocked me initially; engineers use math, not language. My elementary mind could not comprehend the importance, but my adult mind has never stopped thanking him for his insistence.
Now I have a son of my own. He is a very clear carbon copy of me - he is always hungry and he never does what ELE tells him to. So I know that some day, he will ask me "Why?" Actually, that probably will happen every day, but one day it will specifically be about writing. So I think of this blog as a portfolio of sorts, evidence that I believe writing is important. Because I want TRE to understand that some thoughts take more than 140 characters or 6 seconds to express, and are a little too important to be written in textspeak.
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