Albuquerque if you be quirky

Green salsa

on my scrambled eggs later I hop a shuttle and head back home to Cleveland. I’ve just finished spending almost four days at a literacy and comprehension conference here in sunny Albuquerque New Mexico where I attended and [resented sessions. I was lucky enough to work with two stellar educators – Ellin Keene – the author of the seminal comprehension tome Mosaic of Thought and her new book To Understand (which by the way – the copy I lost on the plane a couple weeks ago is still MIA) and her compatriot of comprehension Bruce Morgan author of Writing Through the Tween Years.

We had a great crew of about fifty teachers, reading and writing specialists and administrators- as always Heinemann ran a smooth conference – which in my book means the coffee never ran out! It was nice to be part of such a stimulating and intimate affair. I’m so lucky – I really like my job and the folks I get to work with.

Triathlon season is coming up so I continued getting ready – running in the evenings after the day’s sessions were over. Hitting the pavement @ 4pm in central New Mexico at the end of June means temps nudging the three digit mark with virtually zero humidity – not unlike running inside of a pizza oven. Add the 5300 foot elevation and this sea level Cleveland boy was left feeling like he was sucking dryer vent air through a coffee stirrer. What little cloud cover exists is more reminiscent of stretched wisps of wadding pulled from a brand new Advil bottle than any sun blocking entity. Fortunately the pavement was so hot my feet, throbbing and burning, took my mind off my imminent suffocation. It’s not often that I have to scrape melted asphalt from my running shoes. I don’t know if it is a symptom of the dry air – but the rare shade provided by the rogue sycamore seemed to drop the temperature exponentially more than I had ever noticed in more humid climes. I love you rogue sycamore trees.


It’s tough to get back home from the southwest – there are very few evening flights headed back toward Ohio so I had to stay an extra evening which allowed me time to take a cab into old town with Karen – one of Heinemann’s irascible event coordinating queens - whom I duly impressed with my bartering skills in the little shops and shared a pretty good meal which included some guacamole, very fresh and tasty.

On the one hand – the company was good and it was nice not to be racing to the airport immediately after finishing a presentation but, after a month or so away in four different states it’ll be nice to sleep in my own bed again.

Has it stopped raining in Ohio yet?

Let me take you to the beach - La La La La La La La La - La

Just back from a week at the beach in Oak Island North Carolina!

Bless your heart...

Eating pretzels above the clouds

as I fly home back to the north coast - thirty five thousand feet above Georgia - an hour away from touchdown according to the announcement just made by our flight attendant.

Four days in the upper nineties and humid Deep South – Perry, Georgia followed by Columbia and Lexington, South Carolina. First two days spent speaking and attending sessions at a teacher’s conference the third with a kid’s writing camp and the fourth with a group of about 50 teachers involved with The Writing Project (look it up – it’s a great national program that is based on the principle that if you are going to teach writing you should be a writer.)

It’s been a good week – Sara and I each tried some new stuff which was received well and I took some pretty useful classes myself at the Dodge Learning Resources sponsored Georgia Teaching Writing and Reading Conference. We had some pretty bitchin’ barbecue – listened to some live bluegrass, twangy and frenetic in Lexington with our teacher hosts. I went on a six mile run around Columbia – five of which were finished in a torrential thunderstorm that was amazingly refreshing even with the occasional sting of hailstones. Kurt Vonnegut said that when things are going good one needs to remember to notice and tell themselves so – I remembered to do this as I was soaking wet splash pounding through the rivers of water spurting out of the overtaxed storm drains on Lincoln Street. Of course the namesake is Lincoln the Confederate general in this case.

One recurring theme I have been noticing in the different keynote addresses and breakout sessions I have been attending the past couple years is that of contemplation. Taking time to think, to ponder and to wonder keeps coming up in the lectures given by the educators I have the most respect for. I listened to Georgia Heard talk about creating wonder centers in classrooms, on the flight out reading Ellin Keene’s new book To Understand she stresses the importance of deep thought to, well, understand.


Oh – here’s a side note. I left that book on the plane when we landed in Atlanta – I had the thing packed with notes in the margins, passages underlined, highlighted and paragraphs of my own reflections. I can easily get another copy of the book – but all those notes are gone! I am in the process of tracking where it could be (hopefully not in the trash) I was able to find out that the book was not removed from the plane in Atlanta and that the plane then went to Houston – so I will start with that info when I get home – I’ll let ya know how it goes.

Anyways – back to contemplation and taking time to think deeply. Doesn’t it just make sense? So why is it our education system seems to be set up for expediency? We give pizza parties for the class that reads the most books – who knows what they will retain from that reading or how much they understood – let’s just see how many we can tear through. We measure reading ability with a stopwatch – test comprehension by what can be parroted back – never mind what the piece read might mean to the reader. Here’s a vocabulary list – look up the definitions and use the word in a sentence it doesn’t matter that you have no other context or personal connection to understand the word, just pass the Friday test. Oh yeah – that’s a school book – you better not mark in it!

Isn’t that where the learning is though - in the margins and pigeon scratched notes inside the back cover? That highlighted paragraph – the sticky note in the center of the page, the turned down corner – isn’t that where the thinking is happening? Sometimes the questions don’t get answered, and that’s not the end of the world either. The end is when the questions stop getting asked.

I hope I find my book (it’s become a quest now) – but if not I’ll buy another and fill it all up again with comments and questions – some will be the same and I am sure some will be new.

Last Day of School!

Well at least for me for this year.

Sara and I visited Bay Middle School for a haiku hike and subsequent Head to Head battle. Here's a link to last year's post about the event. That should take care of school visits for the year unless something comes in out of the blue in the next week.

This summer we'll be working together and apart at various teacher institutes across the country - from Atlanta Georgia to Albuquerque New Mexico. We're also talking to overseas schools again and have booked for Abu Dhabi in January and are speaking with others in the neighborhood (that neighborhood being that side of the world.) Korea and Burma are in the mix too and we would love to get back to Indonesia or Africa - hint hint.

In the meantime - here are some pics from my groups haiku hike.

Pretentious Artists

As neighborhood taverns

go the Literary Café in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood has long been one of my favorites. It has a regular cast of characters (heavy on the character side) and also hosts one of the best poetry series in the city.

Another bunch that calls the Lit Café home is the Pretentious Artists of Tremont Drawing Club. Every Friday this crew invites a model to come in for a three hour sitting. To be a model all one has to do is sign up on the calendar that is hanging in the back room. The poobah of the event Tim Herron invited me to sign up back in the beginning of the year. The calendar was booked five months into the future so finally this past Friday I was their guest.

Here are three of the resulting portraits.

by larry zuzik

by tim herron

by Artour

Hook Line and Sinker

Spent Memorial Day at my sister's farm - Here's a pic that she took of my son Frank that just defines bucolic. The tall blond is Stella and the short salt and peppered one is Mabel.

Please Don't Kill Me

Okay,

I signed up for a trio of triathlons this year (with a fourth in Connecticut possible depending on what funds look like at the end of the summer.) My big race this year is going to be the Cleveland Triathlon again. I liked the race last year. It’s fun being downtown with so many folks, over a thousand participants are expected. I’m also running the Fairport Tri – it’s close to home and affordable and then I’ll be doing the Lorain Tri where I placed second in my division last year (my division being that of Clydesdale – competitors weighing over 200 pounds.)

All the running I did in order to run the Cleveland Half Marathon has laid a pretty good base endurance-wise now I need to get my bicycle legs and swim back up to speed. Frankie and I chopped down a tree for my parent’s yesterday and on the way home we passed a half dozen or so cyclist. The number of people on bikes on the side of the road seems to be increasing each year. I’m sure some of this phenomenon can be attributed to the fact that I ride and am more aware of others out there on two wheels – but I’d be willing to bet that the number of folks out there pounding pedals has increased.

So people – please remember to share the road. By law that spandex wearing cyclist has every bit of right to be on the road as those behind their two tons of glass and steel. In fact it is illegal for a cyclist to ride o the sidewalk in most instances. A little common sense comes into play here – when on my townie bike going to the grocery or something I will take to the sidewalk since I am going to be travelling under ten miles an hour for the most part and can make adjustments for pedestrians – on the other hand if I am on my racer pushing twenty five mph – I would be a menace to walkers.

Like any subset of humanity there are idiot cyclists out there but for the most part we have a vested interest in staying alive. To whit I would like to offer a few tips to drivers out there. Firstly, relax. The extra fifteen to thirty seconds your trip will take you to safely pass the guy or gal on the bicycle up there is not going to alter the trajectory of your life a whole hell of a lot. As soon as it is safe to do so pass safely and quickly – prolonging your time behind the rider only prolongs the time that something could go wrong.

Let’s see - you don’t need to beep your horn – we know you’re back there, shouting out your window trying to scare a rider is just stupid – especially when I just might be catching up to you at the next light – fair warning I WILL squirt you with my water bottle. . Oh, this is important, watch your right hand turns – that cyclist you just passed didn’t disappear into the ether because you overtook them – they’re still back there moving forward. I’ve been run off the road a half dozen times in the last three years by people making right hand turns. Every time, I was in a designated bike lane.

So that’s it – keep your eyes open. Even if you raise your awareness to bicyclist by five percent it’ll make a difference ‘cause any of us out there two wheeling it with any sense are spending one hundred percent of our time watching out for you.

Catch me if you can! (you probably can.)

Putting all the hills at the end was absolutely diabolical.

So I survived my first half marathon. Not only did I survive – but I crossed the finish line with a smile on my face even though two of the last three miles were uphill. I was hoping to finish with under eleven minute miles - having already decided that my original idea of nine minute miles was ludicrous after beginning my training program in earnest – but I blew that goal away.

I don’t know if it was the inspirational quotes on the backs of other runners t-shirts “Pain is weakness leaving the body” the beastie boys blaring in my ear buds or just the pure adrenalin rush of running in such a large pack of humanity (five THOUSAND runners in the half marathon) but I came in at about a 9:50 clip finishing in the top third of my division – shaving seconds off each successive mile. A little over four months of training boiled down to a two hour finale.

This event was a family affair in every connotation of the term. Sara walked the 10K my 17 year old son Franklin and my daughter in law Kelly raced the 10k, Frank cruised in with a eight and a half minute pace and my oldest boy Max, up from Ohio State, glided through the half at a 7:30 clip. Max and I used the same training regimen that we downloaded from Marathonrookie.com so we were able to commiserate after each Saturday’s long run.

It all comes down to pacing – throughout the race I passed other runners, my pace for each mile never varying more than a minute or so, and then only because I was shaving off five seconds here and ten seconds there as I progressed through the race, I’d be willing to bet my last mile was my fastest. When I hit those hills at the end I was able to push through while a lot of the folks around me decelerated into a trot and then a walk. Don’t get me wrong, when I encountered the hills with three miles to go there were plenty of racers in front of me who had already finished and were snacking on bananas and lounging in the sun but I am proud to know I ran what was probably the best race I could.

As I entered downtown a half mile or so from the finish I saw Max appear next me – he had finished forty or so minutes ahead of me and I had earlier in the day told him that a real son would track back and find his dad and finish the race with him. Well the kid did it. We crossed the line together, he for the second time (which completely screwed up his ranking since his timing chip was recorded going over the magnetic strip twice.) He pushed me to finish strong which is why I think my last mile was my fastest.

I didn’t forget who I was racing for and I thought about Stephie a lot while I ran and I cried a couple times too – this fact hidden by my wrap-arounds and sweat. I think this race is a good analogy to dealing with the loss of a loved one. You put one foot in front of the other, at your own pace and you move forward the best you can hopefully you pick up a little speed as you go along. Don’t expect it to be easy though – it’s supposed to hurt, if you’re not in pain you’re not trying hard enough - don't worry there are folks at the finish line who are going to cheer you in no matter when you come in. Sometimes T-shirts make good sense.

Release the experts!

Spent yesterday at Berkshire High

working with 9th graders on personal narrative – the day before I videoed the same exercise for an online course at Chancellor University in downtown Cleveland. So Karmic-ly, I guess this is a week for telling and gathering stories.

While I was working at Berkshire (the kids were great – I forgot my camera so no pics, rats) there was another consultant at the school working with teachers on reading across the curriculum. I was heartened to see this. My host teacher – sort of makes me sound like a tick – in her first year of teaching was fresh out of the teacher oven glowing with ideas and enthusiasm but, she was already involved in professional development - kudos to the administrators at Berkshire. (Kudos by the way, is one of the words hilariously defined and whimsically illustrated in my recently published book of SAT level vocabulary word poems – click on the cover over there at the right.) So to torture the host parasite metaphor a bit more, Berkshire High was lousy with consultants.

Consultant – kind of a catch all phrase – that nebulous occupation question line answer that never really satisfies the questioner.

What do you do?
I’m a consultant.

See? Kind of flat, you don’t know if the person answering is really saying, “I am not sure myself what I do” or “it’s none of your business” or “I’m a spy for the Dayton, Ohio chamber of commerce.” Back when I was working in the manufacturing world - consultant meant someone with a briefcase from out of town charging exorbitant amounts of money to tell you things you already know. Even so, when I get bumped into a first class seat on a plane ( an occurrence I consider hazardous duty pay for all the miles I’ve flown in the previous year) I am more likely to tell the guy or gal sitting next to me in their gray fitted business suit that I am an educational “consultant” than a poet. The wispy miasma of consultant-hood is much more easily digested by your typical front of the plane dweller than the perceived cold cock to the back of the ear of poet.

So what is a good consultant?

From my perspective a consultant is a specialist – someone who has studied and become really well versed in one aspect of your whole job so that by conferring with this person you can improve your overall success by implementing new ideas and strategies suggested by them into your routine.

How’s that? Do I sound consultant-ish?

Another way to think about it would be to utilize the ubiquitous sports analogy. Baseball teams employ all kinds of coaches: pitching, catching, fielding, batting, strength, nutritionists, sports psychologist and seemingly lately pharmacists. Now, you’re obviously not going to ask the nutritionist how to hit a high slider – it’s not their job to know this but you would ask them which is higher in potassium, a banana or an avocado. By taking advice from the right experts you improve you overall performance – taking advantage of the extra time these folks have put into that particular aspect of your total profession.

This weekend I am running a half marathon in memory of our granddaughter Stephanie, who we lost to complication of ITP last year at this time. I had no idea how to get ready for a race of this length. So, I went online and found a program to follow put together by an expert – an online consultant - that supposedly will see me crossing the finish line under my own power this Sunday. I’ll let ya know how it goes.

Oh yeah, an avocado has more than twice as much potassium than a banana.

Hiya Watha!

30,000 feet above Illinois

the clouds below look like something a couple of bad dogs might have rend from a couch’s cushion – puffs of stuffing scattered across a transparent living room floor. Fortunately the ear piercing whine that accompanied our takeoff has subsided leaving only an ocean roar that might be emitted from a twenty or thirty foot conch shell as we jet from Minneapolis to Cleveland.

I’m coming back from the International Reading Association Annual conference. This was a good one – I made a lot of really great contacts and even finagled my way into working with one of my pedagogical heroes, Ellin Keene – author of Mosaic of Thought and her newest To Understand. Both are seminal texts on comprehension theory and both make me want to stand up and run around the room in circles to expend the energy infused from the insights I’ve garnered while reading them. I will be a part of her institute at the end of June in Albuquerque New Mexico – I offered to empty waste baskets and park attendee’s cars – I hope she doesn’t take me up on that. In reality I’ll probably end up leading a couple break out sessions or hosting a reading – singing for my supper if you will.

Now is one of those times where it is right for me to sit back and appreciate how good I’ve got it. The last year has been a tough one for so many different reasons but it has also had some pretty high moments as well. This conference I am returning from is one of the higher ones. I was one of the organizers along with Magritte Ruurs, of an event called the IRA Poetry Olio – a fun reading featuring children and young adult authors, poets, and storytellers. This was the 14th annual installment and the third or fourth that I have been a part of.

To mix things up a bit I invited four local Minneapolis poets who have represented their city at the national Poetry Slam to also be on the bill with our more famous and established authors. Working with slam poets is always a precarious endeavor. You never know when one of these firebrands will decide that their “freedom of speech” usurps the sensibilities of their audience. I’ve seen visiting author programs shut down because of a certain “spoken word artist’s” misplaced sense of his or her right to say what they want audience and location be damned.

My trust in Cynthia French, the local organizer I counted on to wrangle me a posse of performance poets was well rewarded – the crew she assembled couldn’t have been more entertaining, gracious, thoughtful of their audience or professional – in a nutshell they made me look like a genius. Their good work has greased the rails for the inclusion of more local slammers when the convention moves to Chicago next year and years to follow.

On a side note – as I was riding the light rail train to the airport I eavesdropped on a conversation between a very pretty and petite blonde young woman and her male companion. She was extolling the virtues of field gutting salmon to make them easier to carry back from a river. I just love the Midwest dontchya know. That pretty missy serving you that apple caramel and pecan pie at the diner might have a smile just as sweet but chances are, if she had to, she could butcher you out and make bacon outta your butt – youbetchya.