A Conversation With My Wife

Yesterday my partner Jennie and I were walking home from the thrift store.  We'd been looking for a pizza slicer.  We've been cutting pizza with a knife for almost two years now.  They didn't have one.  Or a cutting board or a rolling pin - we've been using old wine bottles.  But that's not the point of the story.

"So what do you still have to work on?" Jennie asked me.  We were trying to figure out when to go to Target to liberate (as in buy) our pizza slicer.

"Well, I need to decide if I'm going to record my students' writing this weekend or not," I said.  This solicited a slight internal groan from my partner.  We live in a 436 sq ft apartment, and I can either record a reading in the living room or the bedroom.  Both locations are audible at different levels throughout the apartment.  While my students are producing some great stuff this semester, there's only so many persuasive essays a spouse is willing to listen to in a weekend when she has her own work to complete for grad school.  Jennie is always completely supportive and totally tolerate of this process - she gave me the idea of responding to students writing this way after all - but I can imagine it would get old.  Still, I persisted.

"I can't decide if I should do it for their rough drafts or later on.  I want them to complete some meaningful revision, and I want them to do a peer revision, but they just tell each other that everything in their writing is great."

Jennie nodded sympathetically.  I continued.

"It's like I need to teach them to peer revise . . . oh."

Needless to say, I didn't record their writing this weekend.

Bruce may have just explained to me why my writing workshop was oh, so lame in this post:

I think the portfolio system works really well with certain kids. But it also, in my experience, sets up another kind of kid for a hard fall. The kid I'm thinking of is the somewhat unorganized kid with a lot of outside interests who has a tendency to let things slide until its just past the time when it's possible to actually get it done. They tend to assume, in the absence of other feedback, that they're doing fine, that everything is okay. Then when they find out it's too late and they've let the work pile up too long, and that their grade is going to be a D or an F, they freak out. As do their parents.

That sounds like a good 25% of all my former students. I can be so blind!