I presented to teachers today.

It did not suck.

Please understand that this was kind of important, as my last presentation to teachers was such a god-awful disaster that I seriously considered leaving my job.  I was entirely sure that I had lost any and all of what made me worthwhile in my current position.

Everything we do, if we are to get out of bed in the morning and interact with others, requires a little bit of ego.  Not a ton– though I am an egotistical sonofabitch by most standards– but enough to get out there in the world and not have it crush you like the cockroach you are.  (Feel free to swap “you” for “me” and “I.”)  But for a couple days after one ill-fated presentation, even that took monumental effort.

I used to have no problem with standing in front of a group of people and talking, either about things that I know well or things I know nothing about.  Somewhere along the line, that changed; it took a turn for the worse.  And it’s not all groups; I was able to present my class at school to my peers, a group of people I have tremendous respect for, and my teachers, whom I adore and would never want to let down.  That was no problem at all.  In fact, I looked forward to it.

I wonder sometimes if this is a sign that I am so far removed from the classroom that I know in my heart that I’m less qualified to talk about things than most.  I am feeling that way, even though I was teaching at the college level only a year ago.  But K-12 is a different animal, and it requires a different understanding.  If you have not taught K-12, you cannot actually understand… but then, I suppose what I fear is that I have not taught K-12 in so long that I cannot actually understand either.  That’s disappointing.  And a little scary.

So it was nice that today did not suck.  But I am not out of the woods yet.  I need to find my way back into the school environment for a little while if I am to continue to do my job well.

Kay Ryan is the new Poet Laureate of the United States.  I’m not one to get too awfully excited about Poets Laureate, because, well, it’s probably not really all that desirable a job in some ways and selecting artists to do jobs that are fundamentally administrative… well, the success rate on that is about the same as the success rate for selecting teachers to do jobs that are fundamentally administrative.  Our most recent Poets Laureate have been tremendous artists and, for a variety of reasons, perfectly mediocre Poets Laureate.

Well, in fairness to them, the job description kind of sucks: “The poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress serves as the nation’s official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans. During his or her term, the poet laureate seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry.”  Raising the national consciousness to greater appreciation of anything is all but impossible, unless we’re appreciating terrorist fist jabs and that sort of thing.  And poetry… how is one to raise the awareness?  Fly to Hollywood and ask every studio currently producing a tearjerker movie to include a great poem in the eulogy scene?  Lobby USA Today to replace their visually-appealing-but-grossly-incorrect info-graphics with poem-graphics?

If you ask me (and no one did, by the way), Poets Laureate should be spending all of their time and energy promoting programs for teachers, programs that not only get poetry into schools but raise the quality and character of poetry instruction.  Because it sucks!  From what I have heard, Robert Pinsky did a tremendous job during his tenure as Poet Laureate and has continued to focus his energies in this direction, for which I am tremendously grateful.

Kay Ryan’s appointment to the post has potential, people, so I’m hopeful.  By her own admission, Ryan is “an outsider,” though I suppose I dare you to name a poet who doesn’t believe he or she is, in some fundamental human way, an outsider.  Dana Gioia, maybe.  Billy Collins.  Yeah, ok, so give me a list of ten.

At the very least, I find Ryan’s work to be magnificently energetic.  If you’re not familiar, you should check out these poems.

…by an Earthquake

John Ashbery

A hears by chance a familiar name, and the name involves a riddle of the past.
B, in love with A, receives an unsigned letter in which the writer states that she is the mistress of A and begs B not to take him away from her.
B, compelled by circumstances to be a companion of A in an isolated place, alters her rosy views of love and marriage when she discovers, through A, the selfishness of men.
A, an intruder in a strange house, is discovered; he flees through the nearest door into a windowless closet and is trapped by a spring lock.
A is so content with what he has that any impulse toward enterprise is throttled.
A solves an important mystery when falling plaster reveals the place where some old love letters are concealed.
A-4, missing food from his larder, half believes it was taken by a “ghost.”
A, a crook, seeks unlawful gain by selling A-8 an object, X, which A-8 already owns.
A sees a stranger, A-5, stealthily remove papers, X, from the pocket of another stranger, A-8, who is asleep. A follows A-5.
A sends an infernal machine, X, to his enemy, A-3, and it falls into the hands of A’s friend, A-2.
Angela tells Philip of her husband’s enlarged prostate, and asks for money.
Philip, ignorant of her request, has the money placed in an escrow account.
A discovers that his pal, W, is a girl masquerading as a boy.
A, discovering that W is a girl masquerading as a boy, keeps the knowledge to himself and does his utmost to save the masquerader from annoying experiences.
A, giving ten years of his life to a miserly uncle, U, in exchange for a college education,loses his ambition and enterprise.

A, undergoing a strange experience among a people weirdly deluded, discovers the secret of the delusion from Herschel, one of the victims who has died. By means ofinformation obtained from the notebook, A succeeds in rescuing the other victims of the delusion.
A dies of psychic shock.
Albert has a dream, or an unusual experience, psychic or otherwise, which enables him to conquer a serious character weakness and become successful in his new narrative, “Boris Karloff.”

Silver coins from the Mojave Desert turn up in the possession of a sinister jeweler.
Three musicians wager that one will win the affections of the local kapellmeister’s wife; the losers must drown themselves in a nearby stream.
Ardis, caught in a trap and held powerless under a huge burning glass, is saved by an eclipse of the sun.
Kent has a dream so vivid that it seems a part of his waking experience.
A and A-2 meet with a tragic adventure, and A-2 is killed.
Elvira, seeking to unravel the mystery of a strange house in the hills, is caught in an electrical storm. During the storm the house vanishes and the site on which it stood becomes a lake.
Alphonse has a wound, a terrible psychic wound, an invisible psychic wound, which causes pain in flesh and tissue which, otherwise, are perfectly healthy and normal.
A has a dream which he conceives to be an actual experience.
Jenny, homeward bound, drives and drives, and is still driving, no nearer to her home than she was when she first started.
Petronius B. Furlong’s friend, Morgan Windhover, receives a wound from which he dies.
Thirteen guests, unknown to one another, gather in a spooky house to hear Toe reading Buster’s will.
Buster has left everything to Lydia, a beautiful Siamese girl poet of whom no one has heard.
Lassie and Rex tussle together politely; Lassie, wounded, is forced to limp home.
In the Mexican gold rush a city planner is found imprisoned by outlaws in a crude cage of sticks.
More people flow over the dam and more is learned about the missing electric cactus.
Too many passengers have piled onto a cable car in San Francisco; the conductor is obliged to push some of them off.
Maddalena, because of certain revelations she has received, firmly resolves that she will not carry out an enterprise that had formerly been dear to her heart.

Fog enters into the shaft of a coal mine in Wales.
A violent wind blows the fog around.
Two miners, Shawn and Hillary, are pursued by fumes.
Perhaps Emily’s datebook holds the clue to the mystery of the seven swans under the upas tree.
Jarvis seeks to manage Emily’s dress shop and place it on a paying basis. Jarvis’s bibulous friend, Emily, influences Jarvis to take to drink, scoffing at the doctor who has forbidden Jarvis to indulge in spirituous liquors.
Jarvis, because of a disturbing experience, is compelled to turn against his friend, Emily.
A ham has his double, “Donnie,” take his place in an important enterprise.
Jarvis loses a small fortune in trying to help a friend.
Lodovico’s friend, Ambrosius, goes insane from eating the berries of a strange plant, and makes a murderous attack on Lodovico.
“New narrative” is judged seditious. Hogs from all over go squealing down the street.
Ambrosius, suffering misfortune, seeks happiness in the companionship of Joe, and in playing golf.
Arthur, in a city street, has a glimpse of Cathy, a strange woman who has caused him to become involved in a puzzling mystery.
Cathy, walking in the street, sees Arthur, a stranger, weeping.
Cathy abandons Arthur after he loses his money and is injured and sent to a hospital.
Arthur, married to Beatrice, is haunted by memories of a former sweetheart, Cornelia, a heartless coquette whom Alvin loves.

Sauntering in the park on a fine day in spring, Tricia and Plotinus encounter a little girl grabbing a rabbit by its ears. As they remonstrate with her, the girl is transformed into a mature woman who regrets her feverish act.
Running up to the girl, Alvin stumbles and loses his coins.
In a nearby dell, two murderers are plotting to execute a third.
Beatrice loved Alvin before he married.
B, second wife of A, discovers that B-3, A’s first wife, was unfaithful.
B, wife of A, dons the mask and costume of B-3, A’s paramour, and meets A as B-3; his memory returns and he forgets B-3, and goes back to B.
A discovers the “Hortensius,” a lost dialogue of Cicero, and returns it to the crevice where it lay.
Ambrose marries Phyllis, a nice girl from another town.
Donnie and Charlene are among the guests invited to the window.
No one remembers old Everett, who is left to shrivel in a tower.
Pellegrino, a rough frontiersman in a rough frontier camp, undertakes to care for an orphan.
Ildebrando constructs a concealed trap, and a person near to him, Gwen, falls into the trap and cannot escape.

If you don’t teach online for a while, you forget how time- and energy-intensive it is. My organization, LEARN NC, employs a lot of online teachers, and they’re pretty great. You should see the evaluations they get. They’re awesome.

I’m filling in as an online instructor for a little while, and it’s exhausting. But I really like it– almost immediately, I’ve been able to learn about the students and try to forge a personal relationship with them. It doesn’t happen this way in a face-to-face classroom… some students can be with you for a month before you really know anything about them. I’m not saying that’s good teaching, I’m saying that’s a reality sometimes. In the online environment, they tend to share a little more personal information at the beginning of the course because they don’t see their peers… no immediate feedback.

I don’t know if it’s kosher for me to say this, since I work in online learning, but I don’t know if I like face-to-face teaching or online teaching better. When I teach in a classroom, I have a strong sense that teaching is an art, and one I enjoy. I don’t have that as much online. Which may mean teaching is more science than art, and any gratification I get in the classroom is more my own edification than actual evidence of student learning. I had a boss who used to say, when asked how we knew our program was successful, would reply, “I see that look in their eyes, and I know.” I’ve used that logic myself. And it’s a surprisingly non-measurable metric.

Ah, but that look. That excitement. You don’t see that as much in an online course. Is that look, that excitement the best proof I have that I’m doing a good job? Because, if so, I might really suck at this…

I’m putting together a presentation with Bill Ferris on Virtual Mentoring for the 2008 Raising Achievement & Closing Gaps Conference in Greensboro, NC. (Info for stalkers: Bill and I have two presentations next Tuesday, at 9:15 AM and 2:30 PM.)

It’s been a while since I have created a presentation from scratch; David Walbert and I did one on Web 2.0 last fall, but rather than create a “presentation,” we threw up a wiki with some talking points, and then asked the group to explore and edit, and then we brought them back together for some discussion, during which we modified the wiki. We did the presentation a couple of times, each time using the most up-to-date version of the wiki, and it got better, I thought. It was fun.

Bill and I don’t plan to have participant computers (or even Internet access) for this one, so it was time to create a PowerPoint. I’ve heard about– heck, I’ve presented about– effective use of PowerPoint, but Dan Meyer’s repeated posts about transforming presentations got me thinking about how I could do better, and working collaboratively with Bill meant that I couldn’t be lazy about planning or I’d be making his life more difficult.

So I set a goal– more slides than words in this presentation. I was going to try to find images (using a Creative Commons search on Flickr) that would be more effective at presenting the information than any number of bullet points.

End result: fail. I found one place where it behooved me to include what looks a little like a tag cloud. But the presentation is a far more visual animal than I’ve ever used before, and while it isn’t going to change the world or make the listeners faint with glee, I think it’ll be more stimulating than the norm.

Photos from flickr by Creativity + Timothy K Hamilton, otisarchive1, woodleywonderworks, Del Far, and welshkaren. People who share with Creative Commons are awesome.

The choice quote of my meeting with educators yesterday:

“Collaboration is an acting verb.”

I have been chronically confused for quite some time about i.e. and e.g.– it’s one of those things that I have been meaning to look up but always seem to forget about when I am at a computer. Marielle’s post on Instructify today cured me forever by pointing me to this simple explanation. Thanks, Marielle!

With one of those rare clear days on my calendar, my priorities in decent shape, and only a few things that were pressing on my to-do list, I shut down e-mail for much of the day and did some writing and editing. But instead of concentrating on poems, as I was sorely tempted to do, I wrote most of a two-part series on social networking for Instructify.

And, as with a day or working on poems, I’m bushed now. To reward myself for my hard work, I hopped over to iTunes and bought Pearl Jam’s cover of The Who’s “Love, Reign O’er Me.” Say what you want about Pearl Jam– Eddie Vedder has some pipes. Fuhrillz.

I’m about to head home from work and write the last poem in my two-month grind. I took last night off– I was allowed four days off in November, and ended up taking only one.

I spent the day at the NC School Library Media Conference, which was held in Winston-Salem, NC. I went to only one session that wasn’t a LEARN function– a session on social networking that was, I think, too advanced for beginners, too beginner for the advanced, and strongly focused on the technology rather than what we should be doing with it. (But, despite the fact that I know that sell was a little too hard, and I’m not convinced that the uses are even remotely worthwhile, I went ahead and set up a Twitter account during the session, and have Twittered a couple of times today. I swore I would not use a website with such a stupid name.)

When I got back into Chapel Hill, I headed to Linda’s for a blowout, where I showed Iron Scav pictures and just generally made merry for several hours. While I would normally have used the blowout to act the fool, I was quite tame. Stupid cold. I was very well-behaved. I met Team FAT’s Toilet Paper Mummy.

Waiting for me at home was the letter I’d been hoping for all week– the summary of my degree essay from my supervisor and my second reader. In his summary, Pete used a term that struck me as particularly insightful– and I wish I thought to use it in the essay: “deceptive motion.”

My second reader was who I thought it would be. Total hunch. Maybe I should say that’s who I hoped it would be.

Tomorrow, I sit down to write my semester evaluation. Once again, Warren Wilson has provided me with an academic challenge unlike anything I’d ever experienced before, and I’m so thankful for it.

I spent the day in a training for a product that the Community College system is evaluating, and as awesome as it is, I am not sure I can tell you anything more, because I signed an non-disclosure form. I had never signed a NDA before. I feel now like I have a great secret– though, to be honest, the secret would only have been fair-to-middling if it hadn’t been for the imposing NDA.

November is month 2 of poem-a-day grind, with mildly relaxed rules. Three U of M poets, three from Warren Wilson. Not everyone knows each other. I like it.

Seriously, if I don’t get on the stick and put up a profile for Kirk on Catster tomorrow night, I’m gonna be embarrassed. That cat has needed a profile since Monday.

I just finished paying off my undergraduate education. I wrote the final check today. It feels terrific.

Ironically, the engine for this early final payment was teaching undergraduate creative writing– I just got my payment for that today.

So, after ten years of laboring for the state, all of it at the institution I took out a loan to attend, I’ve finally given back the appropriate portion of the money the state gave me.

Still, and I know I’m repeating myself, it feels terrific.

Now, I just have to pay the state back for the money it gives me to attend graduate school.