My mind is going a million miles an hour and though I am tired I cannot sleep. So I had some caffeine and am in here typing.
I’m not really totally freewriting. I’m not writing, per se. But I am freewriting. This is not free association, though everything in my head seems associated right now. This is freewriting because in looking up multimodal I found a journal and read a wonderful multimodal piece on freewriting and they said none of us teachers do it anymore.
I do it often. Or I do something like it. I have a topic and I write and write and write anything I can think of on the topic or related to the topic. So I guess it is directed freewriting.
If it were undirected freewriting I might tell you that my beagle is lying beside me with her eyes closed. I don’t think she’s asleep yet, but she will be soon. But this is directed freewriting so I am writing on writing, because that is what I have been thinking of and it’s what my mind has been going at the speed of sound about.
What does multimodal mean in a classroom and why should it mean that? I am at the cutting edge, maybe even on the sharpener at my college, while we are leapyears behind other schools. Did you see that great combination class on English literature and computer web design? I still think that would be great.
Could I suggest it to Cindy? Or something like it?
It might be a great way to do the online freshman comp class.
I was thinking about Jing. I need to make a jing for how the students sign in to Davis English. It needs to be up by Monday. So I could do it tomorrow, but today would be better.
I wrote a whole paper, but I can’t find it, on the topic I am submitting to CCTE. I am ready to revise it now, but I can’t find it and I want to go and look it up right now and see if I just saved it somewhere else accidentally, like in Documents or something. But I haven’t. I need to later, but right now I am writing about writing. That’s not writing; it’s research.
I submitted a paper to be published to XXX and I hope it is accepted. I want it to be, but I am afraid it won’t be now that 4C’s has turned me down. (My heart isn’t broken, but my hope is stubbed.)
I still haven’t heard from PCAACA and I won’t hear from TCEA till later. SB is supposed to tell me about the state of the profession paper, but it sounds like it is a wasted effort. (I haven’t let go of hope, yet, though. It’s stubbed, not dead.)
And “massive action” this summer was writing four to eight papers, how many ever there were, and sending them out to see if I could present and get them published. But I can’t control other people’s response to my massive action, so I decided that for each rejection I get (and there will be many) I need to send out a new proposal, a new paper. It might be that some of them can be the old one with a new venue, but I need to keep this ball rolling downhill. I need to be applying and applying and getting accepted.
I need that. Next year I need to have a full-time job so I can send my son to full-time college. And I want to have a full-time job, after fifteen/sixteen years away because I have missed it.
There’s no school like X around here. There was one, but not anymore. I want to teach, with some research, just enough to keep me fresh. I was a bit jaded.
I love teaching at the CC. They have 5 classes for full-timers though. I thought that might be too much. And I wonder if I have lost my chair’s respect because I did say I was getting bored with the class. My dad, a manager, says you should never tell your boss you’re bored. Oops.
This is the year of the job search extraordinaire. And this is the year of all the writing. So I can do a freewriting. And I can share it with the world.
And the beagle is now snoring, so I guess she is asleep.
The article that started this all is “Where Ideas Are Garbage and All Writing is Free: Doubting and Believing in Freewriting.”