Hi, Can I Take Your Order?

On Friday night I went to a Chinese restaurant and the waitress did the "Can I take your order?" spiel and we all ordered our different meals. When she came out with our orders, she ended up giving my friend my order of Snow White Chicken and I got her Almond Chicken. It was an easy fix--just switch the plates and eat what we ordered. Even though this particular waitress confused our orders, we expect our meals to be served to us correctly. And after reading Smith's article on myths I realized that so many of my past teachers expected us to write papers to order. Smith says, "Every experienced writer knows that writing is often most reluctant to come when it is most urgently required, yet quite likely to begin to flow on inconvenient or impossible occasions" (30). We were given explicit directions with rubrics--we were expected to be the waitress and serve our teachers' orders without changing them or giving them something different.

I realized that we can't expect our students to serve papers to us "to order." We have to expect, if not hope for, a different meal; we should leave room for interpretation and creativity from our students.

Sookie is Mine

So my guilty pleasure TV show is most definitely True Blood, seriously it is the most addictive thing on television. My two roommates scoffed at me, saying that they were sick of all the vampire media that has exploded since Twilight and it wasn't until I finally convinced them to watch it with me when they understood. We've been watching it whenever the three of us have free time and last night we stayed up until 1:30 powering through the end of Season 1 and starting Season 2, which consequently made me and one of my roommates to have creepy vampire related dreams.

While the storyline of the show seems ridiculous (and it is), it is incredibly imaginative and always keeps you guessing. I've never really thought that I could write a good fiction piece; I have made some attempts in creative writing classes, but I don't think they could be "publishing worthy"...maybe with some revisions. However, I think that by using inspiration from the show, I could come up with something pretty interesting and maybe something I'm more proud of. Now, I would most definitely not make or tell my students to watch True Blood (for those of you who don't know, it is extremely graphic in many ways...) but I would recommend that they take an aspect of their favorite TV show, movie, book, etc and make it their own, creating an original fictional piece. I think it could turn out to be a pretty good writing prompt to begin a class with.

And to entice you into joining the True Blood obsession, I leave you with the Promo for Season 2: True Blood Promo Enjoy!

STRESSED.

As you notice, I'm writing to you later than I would have liked. While sometimes I can be a procrastinator, I normally like to get things out of the way ahead of time so I actually have some moments of relaxation, or if it's a written assignment, I like to have time to look things over and revise my piece.

All that being said, this week is incredibly busy for me; I feel like I'm swamped in reading, homework and papers. It seems like I'm procrastinating on some assignments for this week, but in reality, I haven't had too much free time to work on all of the assignments. And on top of everything else, I feel like I'm coming down with a cold--just what I need.

Now that that's all out of the way and I've been a Negative Nancy, I don't know how I would approach my students if they were feeling stressed just as I am at this very moment. If any of you have suggestions I will gladly take them and utilize them  for my classroom, and perhaps even use them myself in times like this :)