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šļø Month Notes, February 2024
Lars-Christian noted that month notes work better than week notes for him due to the cadence of his life, and I think this will be true for me, too. So! I’ll be trying month notes for a little while and reevaluate if they start to feel off.
Early this month was rough, as both M and W had pinkeye. I had respiratory symptoms and felt quite miserable but managed to dodge the accompanying eye infection.
We booked a beach condo for a week vacation this year. For almost 20 years, W and I, and then M when he came along, have spent a week at a beach condo owned by W’s bonus mom Cindy and her sister. When Cindy died, W’s dad inherited her part of the condo. But he hates the beach and Cindy’s sister didn’t go down there much, and the property taxes, bills, and maintenance for the space were very expensive. So they decided to sell it, which meant we needed to find a new place to stay for our beach week.
We had hoped to go with another family and get a big house but that didn’t work out, so we found a condo at a beach a little closer to our home than the old one and have a contract to rent it for a week in June. We’ll see how it goes.
I started doing Leonie Dawson’s 40 Days to a Finished Book course. (If you buy the course through that link, I will receive a commission.) I’m writing a little booklet about how to be a better player in tabletop role-playing games, because there’s a lot of advice out there for game masters but only a little for players. I set a target of 10,000 words total. This means I have a very manageable daily goal of 250 words, which so far I’ve been able to for 20 days. When I hit 5000 words early, I worried I didn’t have anything left to say on the topic. I decided to just freewrite the other 5000 words and try to make it all make sense when I’m done. I can write 250 words in 5 or 10 minutes, so this is a really doable practice that I hope to keep up even after the 40 days are over.
On Valentine’s Day, W and I had an early dinner and coffee together. We began answering The Good Trade’s 99 Questions To Ask Your Partner To Get To Know Them Better. The questions are clearly written for young couples who haven’t been together very long, not couples who have been married for 15 years and together for 25. But they were still fun to answer.
One of M’s school mates from kindergarten and preschool had a maritime-themed birthday party at a local park and that was super fun as well as being an opportunity to catch up with some of those kids’ parents whom I haven’t seen in a while.
W and I saw Fat Ham at Playmakers Repertory Company. It was super fun with a stellar cast. We also went to Clue the Movie at the [Retro Film Series[(https://carolinatheatre.org/series/retro-film-series/), which is always a delight.
I had an eye exam. I learned that my eyesight has only gotten a little worse over the past year. I ordered new glasses that look almost exactly like my old ones except they have a narrower frame width so they should fit better, plus some fun prescription sunglasses.
I played Super Mario Bros 1 through 3 and started Ocarina of Time. W and I have been watching Home Economics and it’s a delight, but it makes me wonder how much TV writers know about how publishing works. I’ve been tearing my way through the Immortals After Dark series at a pace of two books a week and listening to the accompanying episodes of the [Fated Mates[(https://fatedmates.net/) podcast, plus hanging out in the Fated Mates Discord a lot.
I’m almost done organizing our pantry. I’m planning to eat down what we’ve got in the pantry, fridge, and freezer, and then try eating from the Real Easy Weekdays plan.
I think that’s about it for me for February. What have you been up to?
Taking a break from academia
I’m taking a deliberate break from all things academia and academia-adjacent.
I spent the past 2 years working on a big project as the key academic personnel on the project. It’s not done; when my contract ended, I had to hand it off to my colleagues. (We couldn’t extend the contract for administrative reasons.)
I’m sitting on a couple of freelance academic opportunities but as I think about pursuing them, I know it’s just not time yet. I can feel internal resistance and it’s telling me that after being in an academic headspace for more than 8 years, it’s time to do something different for a while.
Do I plan to come back to these freelance gigs and be available for academic contract work in the future? Yes. Do I plan to return to FanLIS and fan studies more broadly after I fill my well? Absolutely! But right now, that’s not where I’m at.
It’s kind of like taking a sabbatical.
šļø Week Notes, 2024, Weeks 3 through 5: A Link to the Past and Linkās Awakening Are Super Fun
Itās three weeksā worth of week notes at once!
My son Mās school has a āDay Onā on Martin Luther King, Jr. day. They choose a theme for the day and hold a celebration where the whole school community, including parents, is welcome, and then spend the second half of the day on service projects. Our family only did the celebration part of the day this year, but next year I plan for us to help with the part of the day where you sort book donations to Book Harvest. Iām also planning to join the celebration for the choir next year.
The theme for this year was āLove is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.ā The choir sang 3 songs I love: āLift Evāry Voice and Sing,ā āHeal the World,ā and āStand By Me.ā Middle and high school students read poems they had written. Pauli Murrayās niece and biographer Rosita Stevens-Holsey was the keynote speaker and shared wonderful insight into Rev. Dr. Murrayās life and work. I was so happy to have attended.
At the end of that week, I took a quick overnight trip to Baltimore to present at the American Library Association LibLearnX conference. In the end, my session was less a presentation or workshop and more a conversation, as we only had about 5 people attending. We were able to really customize the conversation to the participantsā interest. My BFF lives near Baltimore, so I got to have dinner with her the night before the presentation and hang out with her after, when we went to the Edgar Allan Poe house and wandered around a cute shopping area.
After I got home from that trip, I was exhausted and then a little bit sick, too. So I rested a lot and had a pretty quiet week.
Then this past week was more quiet time at home and handling administrative stuff like having my car inspected and renewing the registration, rescheduling a dental appointment I canceled due to a migraine, and completing the job application to be the half-time school librarian at Mās school.
It was a good time for consuming culture. Iāve been reading romance novels, The Age of Cage, and How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are. I watched Emily in Paris. I played A Link to the Past, which is phenomenal and deserves its status as a classic, and the Switch remake of Linkās Awakening, which is super fun.
Saturday M developed a nasty case of pinkeye. Heās on his second day home from school and on antibiotics for it and seems to be improving.
Thatās it for this post!
š Reading Notes: A Quaker Book of Wisdom by Robert Lawrence Smith, Chapter 9, āEducationā
ā¦a good school is one that is constantly engaged in self-examination, in improving itself, in becoming wiser in its ability to both teach and inspire.
Smith returns to this idea many times in this chapter. Every school Iāve worked at had some sort of process for this, but Smith says that in a Quaker school, everyone in the school is involved in this process. In the public schools where Iāve worked, there was always a School Improvement Team (PDF). This is basically a committee and it consists entirely of adults. Students arenāt on the SIT. Further, as you might expect in a public school, the success of the School Improvement Team and the School Improvement Plan is evaluated based almost entirely on studentsā scores on standardized tests, which to my mind is an incomplete measure of learning.
Itās a school that is intent on turning out good people who will help make a better world.
At the beginning of every school year, Mās teachers have us complete a survey and one of the questions is always about our hopes for the school year. We always answer that we want him to grow into himself and to continue to learn how to be a caring member of our community. I love this idea. While I suspect most teachers in most schools have this in mind as their intention, the systems and structures of compulsory public education, at least in North Carolina when I was working in public schools, tended to focus on performance in a few academic subject areas and compliance with school policies. I like the idea of a whole school taking this approach, rather than only individual teachers.
Itās the soul of a schoolāits intangible persona, its character, its principles, its daily life over time, the impressions it makes, the efforts it inspires, and the moral authority it possessesāthat helps mold a child into an educated, assured, humane, and caring adult.
Yes! Especially the daily life over time: how we spend our moments is how we spend our days is how we spend our years is how we spend our life. The life of a school is in the day-to-day.
At a good school teachers and students are jointly engaged in a search for truthā¦
This jibes well with a school librarianās focus on inquiry-driven learning.
Teachersā¦ work to provide a climate of sensitivity to the human condition.
This is so critical. When I was a student teacher and first set foot in my mentor teacherās classroom, I was appalled by what seemed to me to be an out-of-control class with absolutely no attention paid to Latin, the classās subject matter. (I was 22 and I like to think Iām less judgy now.) By the end of my four months in student teaching, my perspective had totally transformed: I saw that my mentor teacher was more concerned with supporting her students than with a laser focus on their academic achievement, and that her love and support was a critical foundation before they could have academic success.
Without input from people of differing life experiences and cultures, a school quickly becomes insular and intellectually stagnant.
It seems obvious but itās absolutely necessary to say.
ā¦moments of silence help students center themselves amidst the hubbub of the school day.
To quote the Carolina Friends School website:
Settling In and Out
We use this Quaker practice of shared silence as a meaningful way to make oneself present in the moment, focus or redirect attention, and create a shared energy and sense of intention with a community.
Back to the bookā¦
Another characteristic of Quaker schools is that they have involved students in community service at all grade levels.
Experimental education is the name of the game in Quaker schools, and they are constantly cooking up new ways of doing things.
And whatās probably my favorite quote from the chapter:
There is no formula for imparting love of learning. Despite new methodologies, there must always be reliance on the old virtues of skills, care, love, patience, and time.
Care, love, patience, and time are all things that the structures of public schools make it hard for teachers to prioritize, though I bet most teachers would love to be able to prioritize them.