Ideas Floating Through the Jelly of My Brain

It’s a beautiful day, and I’m inside at the local big box bookstore waiting on my wife and daughter to call.  Beautiful is an understatement- gorgeous blue skies, cool breeze, trees roaring back to life.  This is the start of Spring Break.  My hope is to write at least one new post a day during break.  This may be far more ambitious than originally conceived, but I have to start somewhere.
Yesterday, a student asked me, “If I wasn’t teaching, what would I do?”  A bit non sequitur, but after a few moments hesitation I replied, “Writing.”  To be honest, this was only a half-truth.  I do want to write; I want to tell stories.  I want to share all the ideas floating through the jelly of my brain, like this one:

A young man knocks on the door and casually, with the familiarity of a nephew, asks the occupant if he’d like to buy some books to sponsor his college and if he buys a few items he has a greater chance of winning a $15,000 scholarship for college and won’t he just buy one because I even have children’s books and you can buy some books for your daughter c’mon man you can buy a few can’tcha? The man smiles thinly and says we’re about to have dinner, why don’t you come in and join us for a bit and we’ll take a closer look at your lists of items to sell. The boy, whose face is marked by late adolescent acne, hesitates for a the briefest of moments, but seeing the man has a daughter and smelling the scent of something cooking from the kitchen decides the sale just might be worth taking a few extra minutes and enters the small, suburban home much to his regret.

I do want to write, but I’m not sure that I can give up time in the classroom, time away from young people.  What I really should have said was, “I want to start a business like Dave Eggers started in New York and in Los Angeles.  I want to create a place where young people can learn about computers and writing and media production, where the young people can discover their voice and express that voice in a safe, comfortable environment, a place where what they produce isn’t graded on a rubric or dictated by state standards, where if they come late or stay later they won’t be punished or pushed out the door, where a young person can rediscover that learning can be and is fun.   An after school program that will support classroom learning in a way that is non-threatening, inviting, open.

I am tired of the rules of the classroom. Tired of the grading, the rubrics, the state mandates, the budget cuts, etc.  I want to have fun learning again.  I want my students to have fun too, not just see learning as something they have to do but rather something they want to do.