And They're In The Mail. That's a Wrap. It's Saturday, and Now I Need to Catch Up. Work Zone the Next 48 Hours

200 copies of POW! The Anthology (Ed. 2) were packaged and sent out yesterday after I ran a session with 8th graders who read Kwame Alexander's The Crossover.  The work from this summer's teachers and students was phenomenal, and I am really proud of how the text came together...so proud, in fact, I wanted to drive it directly to each and everyone's home.

The redesign of Young Adult Literacy Labs were the result of my teaching in Louisville, Kentucky, my knowledge of the National Writing Project, and research conducted at Syracuse University. Coincidentally, just yesterday, a publication was announced by the formative experiment in Central New York that influenced CWP-Fairfield's summer alterations:

Reading & Language Arts professor and chair Kelly Chandler-Olcott, RLA doctoral student Janine Nieroda, and RLA alumnus and Fairfield assistant professor Bryan Ripley Crandall have published “Co-planning and Co-teaching in a Summer Writing Institute: A Formative Experiment” in Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education. The full-text article is available at http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/wte/vol3/iss2/3/.

It's been a busy, but wonderful week, even if it was too full of meetings. Meetings meetings meetings meetings until 5 p.m. on a Friday. But, when it was time to depart, I decided I was just going to leave and I did. I left for a cheeseburger and, yes, I ate the bun this time!

So, today, it's Saturday and I'm going to make up for lost time. The goal is to nerd out for 48 hours so I'm ready to leave for D.C. next Wednesday (I have two book chapters that need to be finalized already). There's always so much to do, but I think I'm almost ready for the frantic three weeks ahead. Need to read more, plan more, organize more, and write more. Yep Yep Yep

I have no problem hunkering down to get this work done. It is work that I believe in.