7 hours.

The clock is ticking. The boy is sleeping. What is holding me back?

In little more than 7 hours, I will need to not only hand over a finished paper, but also present it. Take questions. Act as if this was a labor of love. As if writing was pleasurable. As if my ideas will really contribute to the betterment of the world.

A performance of a lifetime. On 2.5 hours of sleep.

Accepted!

The news just came in over the net...

My abstract was accepted! Spain is in the horizon!

Now I have to figure out how to pay for it...

Happy Mothers' Day.

Today, traditionally, has not been a very good day for me. It's been 21 years since I got to celebrate with my mom. 20 years of terrible, no good, very bad Mothers' Days. With the babylove, Mothers' Day has started to look up.

This one started off rough. Modern Love tortured me a bit. I usually shed a few tears when I read it, but today I was a sprinkler system by paragraph 2.

Red eyed and sniffly, I helped my malformed husband get into the car, while carrying our son and all appropriate baggage. Dave sat down on the kitchen floor yesterday to play with Spence and stood up crooked. Literally. He can no longer walk (really) and sort of shuffles along on his tip toes. There was no "Honey, you sleep in. It's Mothers' Day." Not even a routine day, as Dave is vital to the whole operation. Today was a taste of single motherhood with a hunched husband in tow.

We had a lovely brunch with my mother in law before we set out for Urgent Care. It should have been Fathers' Day. Dave loves the special attention of Urgent Care and it could have been a treat. But, it was decidedly not his day. And this was no treat for me. Spence and I got to spend a few hours destroying Barnes and Noble and pooping a lot (Spence, not me) while Dave waited to be seen.

We picked up his narcotics, drove by the house we're coveting, and headed home. My mother in law made another appearance to spend a little QT with the boy while I took a power nap, grocery shopped and make sloppy joes and kale for dinner.

Every day with Spence is unusually great. Even this one.


It doesn't mean that the hole in me that yearns for my mom is filled. It's as big as ever.

From the Borderlands: Navigating Communities in the Induction Phase of Teaching

Not done with the paper. Not even with the outline. But, here's the abstract I just submitted for a conference in Spain. Ole!

Teachers in their induction phase often find themselves navigating from the borders of many different cultures in order to find success in teaching, yet lack a literacy for navigating these communities. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) does not capture the complexity of communities converging on educators in their first year of teaching, as they imagine a singular notion of community. Pushing on LPP with Anzaldua’s borderland consciousnesses, this case study of two teachers in a structured induction program explores how they attempted to build teachers’ literacy in negotiating multiple communities in a bounded school site. The paper analyzes situations where the new teachers used literacy practices to read competing and conflicting communities at the school site: classroom, school, teaching, district and racial communities. These teachers negotiated entry not from a legitimate peripheral position of participation, but from the deeply vulnerable position of Anzaldua’s borderlands. Implications are drawn for constructing opportunities for new teachers to be mentored in gaining fluency in negotiating multiple communities at a school site.

Gloria.

I had been struggling and chewing on a paper I have due soon. I couldn't even articulate what I wanted to say. Researching, reading and then researching some more. But last night as I was headed to bed, I had a little light fall into my life. I figured out what I could say and who could help me say it. Gloria Anzaldua.

I rode lightrail with a purpose this morning. Re-reading sections. Dog-earing others. Starting to figure out how this paper might actually get written. Energized, I sneaked out of work a bit early. I made it to the coffee shop and pulled out my computer to work.

I made it. Gloria didn't. She is somewhere riding a lightrail train to the Mall of America. Hopefully, someone will be able to get inspired by her wisdom. It just won't be me.

No More Drama

After dreaming endlessly about Star Tribune headlines "Kristy Snyder Single-Handedly Denies School of Funding," I woke up early and scurried for the bus. As my lightrail train approached the school, I took note that there was only one car in the parking lot. And it wasn't a Jaguar.

The school was empty, save for the hard working custodial staff. My crafty plan to meet up with the principal at 7:45 to figure out this debacle really didn't pan out. I was there. He was not.

In the end, he was right. No drama. Just a calm phone call that made an exception for our school. Tests will be picked up tomorrow.

Dropping the Ball.

There are many reified truths about you that you could tick off without thinking: for instance, I believe in a Sunday morning ritual that involves the New York Times and the same brunch spot....I take strange comfort wandering through the aisles of the local Target. And, if given the choice between calling someone and figuring something out on the internet, I always choose the road of least social contact.

So when it came time to contact the agency that picks up THE STATE TEST and I was confronted with a web address and a phone number, I quickly logged on, entered our information, attempted to change the contact information from the test coordinator out on paternity leave to me, and logged off feeling satisfied. I am not the test coordinator, nor have I been to any informational meetings on how to "do" this test administration, nor am I even an employee of the school district, but nevertheless I found myself responsible for counting, bubbling, organizing and boxing up the test materials for my school.

My stomach has been at odds with this responsibility for the past few weeks. Gurgles of acid whispered worries that I bubbled things in wrong or stacked the piles incorrectly while putting them in the boxes or even that the testing pick-up scheduled for the last day possible for tests to be collected would go awry.

I mustered up my mild social anxiety and called K2Logistics. The words "no record of the school" and "we sent an email to the testing coordinator" and "too late to schedule pick up now" spilled into my ear.

All thoughts of social anxiety evaporated and new fears of Star Tribune exposes about the woman who single-handedly destroyed a school took up new residence in my head. I started calling any and everyone in the district's testing office, the principal, teachers, the secretaries...anyone. But, it was 4 p.m. on a dismal Friday afternoon. No one was answering.

Our fearless principal finally did call me back and attempted to ease me out of my frenzied state with promises that we'd work it out on Monday. "There has to be a way."

I just don't think he gets it.