I brought three veteran teachers, one first year teacher, and a graduate student with me to Orlando. We all had a great time and met up with lots of other UConn colleagues—some professors and many teachers newly graduated from the School of Education. I was on three panels on Thursday, one for State and Regional Writing Project Networks, one for Writing Center Collaborations, and one for the Writing Project Site Early History Project.
At the SRN panel, I got to share all the work Jane Cook and I (mostly Jane) have done on the CWP website over the last few years, particularly showcasing the work we did for last April’s New England Writing Projects Annual Meeting that we hosted in Storrs.
At the Writing Center panel, Jane and Denise Abercrombie got to share all their hard work and the success they have had establishing and running writing centers at Windham Middle School and EO Smith High School, and Kaylee Czajka and Jessica Cullen, last year’s and this year’s graduate assistants in charge of the writing center collaboration, got to talk about running the pelatihan and support aspects of the collaboration, like the now-annual fall conference.
That panel was a huge success, and toward the end of the day we learned that UConn’s Writing Center had just received a CCCC Certificate of Excellence, in part for their work on public school outreach. If you want to learn a little more about the Writing Center’s outreach program, go here: Writing Center Outreach.
For the Early History Panel, I got to share all the discoveries I made with the help of my last two writing interns, Ben Miller and Jessica Mihaleas, about the CWP’s direct involvement in and funding of Writing UConn, which became the Long River Review, and the Graduate Student Training Seminar Journal, which was the precursor to Essay Connections, which publishes award winning Graduate Student Critical Essays, Freshman English Essays, and now Writing in the Disciplines essays.
On the pages of the old journals from the 1980s, I found the names of all sorts of now-notable and well known writers, teachers, and professors, folks like the author Wally Lamb and former Connecticut State Troubadour Hugh Blumenfeld. Jessica put together a nice display of select volumes for this year’s Aetna Awards Night, and I shared her write-ups and some photos.
On Friday I was invited to a book launch panel for What Is ‘College-Level’ Writing? Volume 2, which includes on its companion website an article by me, eight TCs (mostly from the 2007 Summer Institute) and one former student, Lindsay Larsen, who’s student teaching in Colchester now and who also has her own single-authored piece in the print edition. The session was much more than a publication party. The room was literally standing room only, all high school teachers and community college and university professors.
Each of the three editors spoke briefly, and then all the contributors who were present got to say a little something about our chapters, and then it became an open lembaga with lots of great discussion. I have almost finished re-reading the book, and I really like the volume. You can read the article I was the lead author for at the companion website here: Companion Website.
Shortly after returning home, just after the Thanksgiving holiday, in fact, I received my copy of UConn Magazine, which includes an article by me I worked on throughout last year. It’s about public education in general, but it is specifically about how underfunding has damaged public education, and uses my son’s school as an example. I have written about this topic and about my son’s school in this blog at various times, but to see the complete article you can go here: UConn Magazine.
My original draft of the article was almost three times as long, and included much more disturbing information that I couldn’t include because I couldn’t get any administrators to confirm what some classroom teachers had alleged, but I had space constraints anyway, so I had to cut it short.
My good friend Patti, who is the director of University Communications, warned me that my article might cause some controversy, and in fact the morning after the print version arrived in mailboxes, I got my first phone call to my home from an angry neighbor who started to yell at me “as a neighbor and a tax payer,†and who was deeply offended when I told him that I did not consider it appropriate for him to call me at home. I told him that if he would contact me at my office email of phone number I would gladly speak with him, but then he became verbally abusive and I had to hang up the phone. He never called my office, though I gave him the number.
Later, when I walked my son to school, one of the classroom aides stopped me in the hallway and thanked me for the article, and that made up for the disgruntled neighbor on the phone.
A couple days after, once the article went up online, I posted a link to it on my facebook wall, and marveled at the wonders of social networking, as I received wallposts from many teachers and TCs, several professors from my department, a couple of local community college professors, current graduate students, former grad school colleagues (including one from my MA aktivitas in California), current undergraduate students of mine, former undergraduate students of mine, former high school students of mine, a couple of local writers who work a lot with the CWP, an old college friend who marveled at how much I have cleaned up and straightened out—and my mother (who is a retired teacher). All in all, very cool.
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