how am i this busy?

+ i've had a fair number of jobs in my life, as well as a few "careers" (network admin, tech writer/web designer, area analyst for a nonprofit, and teacher). out of all of them, teacher has been the most stressful, busy, challenging, time consuming, and crazy-making  out of the bunch. 

thus, i know busy. 

(for reals)

anyway, here i am living my best edwardian lady of leisure life and you'd think i'd be in a fugue of lollygagging. but noooo. busy busy busy. just a different TYPE of busy: this one is less performative, less structured, less soulless. 

+ i've been looking through some of my old lesson plans and found one on characterization. i distinctly remember teaching this lesson to a group of very low-level readers/writers and what prompted the lesson. while most of what we wrote was not fiction, there WERE times we did focus on creativity and the invention of worlds and people. the least skilled and least read writers will describe their characters without...describing them. 

characters, for their own writing, have descriptors like this:

"she looked like beyoncé." or "he looked just like drake." 

there are some notes i made at the end of my lesson plan about how things went and apparently, they went really well! i had some samples of how some of the students improved and, by golly, they actually DESCRIBED their characters! bless them! 

( Read more... )