It is the kind of morning when I wonder if I should move money out of my savings account where my tax returns came for the past several years. Now that Elon Musk's team appears to have access to all sorts of government computer systems, a team that has not been vetted or given security clearances, I'm not sure that my bank account is safe. I'm glad that we put much of our money into our home repairs--it's much harder for hackers to steal my appliances, my furnace, my kitchen cabinets and counters.
Do I really think that Musk's team of college kids is interested in my meager savings account (meager compared to that of rich people, but not meager to me)? Probably not, but I am fairly sure they are leaving holes by which shadowy actors might be able to get to my money. Will FDIC still be around to protect my funds or refund my bank account in the case of fraud? Who knows.
This morning's headlines about Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank made me wonder if I was looking at a satire, with the basic takeaway being that Trump wants the US to be in control of Gaza and the West Bank, which he seems to see as a huge redevelopment potential project. A reporter asked if the US would send troops? Sure!
It's the kind of morning where I look away because it's all too dystopian/absurdist. And then I look up and it's 5 a.m., and I wonder where the time went. Did I get papers graded? No. Did I write a poem? No.
I did download the reading for Thursday's class. Did I read it? No. I did order my cap and gown for my May graduation, but that doesn't explain where my morning time went.
But let me end on a positive note: yesterday's classes went REALLY well. It's a bit surreal to be talking about the gilded age and President McKinley in my American Lit class at the same time that a U.S. president is claiming that McKinley was one of the greatest presidents--and odd to remember a time when I lived on McKinley street when we first moved to Hollywood, FL, and I remember thinking how little I knew about that president. We had a great class, talking about the history from the 1880's to the 1920's, and the impact of the history on the literature.
Before that, I had a great Nonfiction writing class. We did a lot of generative writing in the first part of class. I was trying to generate ideas to write about a favorite tree poetically. I've done something similar before, which I wrote about in this blog post. I have a word list generated by my 101 students in the fall. I called out a word, and had them write for 40 seconds; we did this for 10 words. I then had them write a sentence or a line of 5-10 words. Then I gave them the complete word list and had them choose the three most evocative. We did a free writing for 5 minutes (keep writing, no stopping, no correcting). Again, I had them write a sentence or a line of 5-10 words. Then we put the lines/sentences on the three whiteboards around the room. It was intriguing.
And then I gave them the worksheet below. They filled in the blanks and then chose one and wrote for 10 minutes--writing a short story or a poem or a view from the tree. On Thursday, we'll start to figure out how to turn all the prewriting into an essay.
The tree sings __________________ at night.
The tree yearns for ________________________.
The tree misses __________________________.
_________________________ misses the tree.
The tree contains a secret which is __________________.
The tree’s favorite color is ___________________________.
The tree’s best friend is _________________________.
The tree resembles this human made object.
The tree wraps itself in a quilt made of ___________________.
The tree goes _______________________ for vacation.
The tree wishes you knew ____________________________.
No comments:
Post a Comment