Late-Night Musings: Reading, Writing, Teaching, Living

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I forgot that I needed this as a place to make sense of ideas and thoughts. Being at OU for three weeks as both teacher and student, I am overwhelmed by the sea of ideas in which my mind is swimming.

Foucault has a quote drawing on Seneca that I read in an essay by David Bartholomae:

Through the interplay of selected readings and assimilative writing, one should be able to form an identity through which a whole spiritual genealogy can be read. In a chorus there are tenor, bass, and baritone voices, men’s and women’s tones: “The voices of the individual singers are hidden; what we hear is the voices of all together…I would have my mind of such a quality as this; it should be equipped with many arts, many precepts, and patterns of conduct taken from many epochs of history; but all should blend harmoniously into one.”

I love this quote because for me, reading, writing, teaching, and living are things that are inextricably linked. For the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about how I’m here to read in order to learn how to write better in order to learn how to teach better in order to live more honestly. And those words–read, write, teach, and live–can be shuffled and that sentence still makes sense to me.

I wonder if we can add to Foucault by saying something like: “Through the interplay of selected readings and assimilative writing” as well as interesting friends, families, coworkers, teachers, and students, “one should be able to form an identity through which a whole spiritual genealogy can be read.”

And so, that is to say, I think it’s time to start using this blog again as a place to polish ideas and thoughts, hopefully with your help, to become a better teacher, writer, reader, thinker, and human being. I can’t promise there will be any regularity to my posts or even that they will be anything more than self-indulgent musings, but I’m going to start using this place as a way to publicly upload things I’m thinking about. So thanks for indulging me.

Teach for America Left Me

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Before I graduated from college I became committed to the idea that I would never write a blog post about an organization after I left it. If it was my choice, I didn’t need to make it worse by writing about it. If it wasn’t my choice, I wouldn’t want to throw the organization under the bus. But at the time I oriented myself this way, I believed this value was at the very bottom of the list of values I might have to exercise in my lifetime.

Then I was in a car crash.

A couple of months ago, I thought my life would go back to normal after I was healed. I knew, for medical reasons, I needed to stay in Ohio so I put in a request for a transfer to Teach for America’s southwest Ohio region.

The Detroit region put my transfer through, but I still haven’t heard from the southwest Ohio region.

I have been passionate about Teach for America since my junior year of college. I have defended it and supported it a countless number of times. What this experience has taught me is that I think I was at first passionate about TFA because I have always and will always be passionate about education. So since TFA has put a roadblock in my way, I have to go around it.

I am going to the University of Dayton to get my license and masters in secondary integrated language arts.

I wasn’t going to publish this blog post. I thought it was going to sit on my computer until the end of time, but yesterday TFA reached out to me about helping them with recruiting. The person who sent the email told me she just emailed everyone on TFA’s corps member list. I haven’t heard from TFA in three months and have no idea what I am “officially” to TFA.

All of that being said, I want it to be known that I am not leaving TFA; TFA is leaving me.

A Purposeful Blog Post

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“Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.” – Elie Wiesel

I’ve decided I want to make it public knowledge that I’m writing a book about my recovery. The book has gone through many differences in the way I talk about it. At first, I was going to make it a memoir; then I was going to make it a memoir with very little mention of my accident; then I decided I wasn’t writing a book at all—mostly due to the fact that I realized that I didn’t want to be tied to my traumatic brain injury (TBI) for the rest of my life. I didn’t want TBIs to be my thing.

Then, the more I reflected on it and the more miraculous I began to realize my recovery is, I began to think that I had been given a remarkable story. It would be selfish to keep that story to myself. And as I began thinking about writing a book about my recovery, I realized how much it would have helped me, my caregivers, and my family. There have been some very dark times for me, my immediate family, and those who are close to us. And when you are in a dark time, you feel alone. What would it have been like to have a book that told me that I wasn’t alone—that others had traveled a path similar to mine?

Writing my book (which is a little short of twenty pages now) is why my blog posts have been few and far between recently. My motivation for writing this post is because I figure that someone who reads my blog either knows someone at a publishing company or knows someone who knows someone at a publishing company. I’d really appreciate it if you could put in a good word for me wherever you have a connection.