12th Edited Collection of Student and Teacher Writing, POW!, Will Be Heading Off to the Publisher Soon. Hard to Believe We've Gone Full Circle Again

In the pre-tenure, bad years, where everything was dumped on junior faculty and there was little room to resist, it took me almost a year to get POW! to the publisher. Now, post-tenure and granted Full Professorship, I'm more entitled to call the shots the way I want them to be played, and this includes prioritizing what is most important to me, which is getting a copy of the publication in the hands of teachers and students from summer programs as soon as possible.

This means, of course, that I am spending all my free time editing the writing of 100s of teachers and kids so it is ready to head to the printshop. The little kid writing and Ubuntu Academy cracks me up and brings total joy. Teacher writing is peculiar, but it's easy to figure out what they're trying to accomplish. As for the middle-grade novelists. Oi Vay! Now that is a process. The kids never seem to put a name on anything. They love adding tabs and using bizarre fonts that don't translate well to our editing software, and they only sometimes choose to use punctuation (which is agonizing when 150% of their novel is written in script form. In the end it comes together, but while editing I want to gouge my eyes out.

This is the 12th publication of POW! and we're using it to celebrate our 40th anniversary in Connecticut. We're just a decade younger than the first institute that was established in 1974.  I'm not sure the teacher network is as solidified as it was in the 80s and 90s, but we're doing everything we can to fight the encroachment of politicians destroying what actually works in the classroom. It gets harder every year.

I'm not sure what got into me yesterday to commit to 14-hours of editing, but I know I want to get this off my plate so I can be prepared to put out the zillion fires that will likely arrive when everyone else returns to campus after three months off after taking their summers 'to write.' I use the pace of summer to stay disciplined, and usually dust of 2 to 3 articles myself (which I did this summer, which pleases me, because I'm also running a 175 hours of labs, teaching, and editing POW!. 

I'm fickle about the heat. I don't mind it in July and am used to sweating bullets then. When it enters August, however, with the grass and perennials all dried up (I don't water) and the cicadas humming as they do, I don't want the heat. I'm sick of it. My throats dry. My mouth is dry. My nostrils are dry. I want rain and revitalization....not humidity and air quality alerts.

It's already Tuesday and my summer to-do list is waiting for me to yell ta-da! All done (it won't happen, but I will try). 

Here's to the grind. For many of us, it's all we will ever know.