July 13, 2007
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This is me and Adria, my fellow teacher in crime, eating gaddo-gaddo pasta on a recent camping trip to Ricketts Glenn State Park, in Pa. On Sunday, we’re flying down to Mississippi together to build some houses with the organization Habitat for Humanity.
I’m in the midst of my summer vacation, having just finished up my first year of working as a teacher. I’ve decided to restart posting on this blog after comments from a couple of friends who have asked about this. This blog will now be in honor of my friends who find interest in reading whatever it is I have to say. It’s also a new attempt for me to connect with people. I want my writing to be brutally bold and honest, and I look forward to the potential to learn again from those who choose to respond here.
Along with updates on life, I want to use this forum as my personal confessional. I’m a person who is riddled with undiagnosed anxieties, depression, and also brilliance some may say (at least the girl in the picture seems to think there’s some good in me). I want to learn more about my problems, and perhaps others will connect to what I am writing, and will shed some insite as I go along. It’s not a cry for help, but an attempt to come out publicly about the problems I have, that I cannot really share verbally. Writing will hopefully be my first step to me dealing with thoughts of not wanting to live anymore to escape the psychological pain that I am working so hard to cope with. In fact, it is perhaps writing itself that is saving my life. Daily, I now try to write, to capture the exact thoughts that lead me to such extreme negative thoughts, and from there, to begin to create the positive habits that can hopefully lead me to good mental health.
I have set a temporary goal of summer of ’08 for achieving some level of mental clarity and health. This blog will help in that process, and will also be about my daily doings. As a teacher of writing, I am trying to be more of a writer myself, even though I cannot fully reveal this writing to my school or my students, I can still be true to them by sharing how I do write as a means of helping myself through life’s challenges, and how I use it to build relationships and learn from others. So please share your questions and comments.
Anyways, good to be back, for now.
-cheers.
Comments (2)
good to have a goal post to look forward to…
Need to sleep, then read in detail. But wanted to add: Yesterday I ran a seminar for teachers of kids who’ve been “sent away” from the Detroit Public Schools. All kids with multiple disabilities. The big focus was using technology to build engagement. We’re going to start delivering content, assignments, reminders via mobile phones – which they do all have, requiring text messages to demonstrate assignment completion, day or night. We’re creating Google Accounts so they can write in Google Docs, and thus freely collaborate. We’re using ViaVoice for Speech Recognition so the ones who can’t write at all can start to tell their stories, and get peer feedback. We’re using Map Mash Up stuff to let them start to visually xpand their world, and we’re doing paired writing in the mornings with some schools in the UK, so they are forced to learn how language has to change based on audience. Anyway, leveraging the stuff of our technological age and the tools they already understand – based heavily in research from England, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and sub-Saharan Africa. It’s exciting stuff.