What's become of me...

No, I haven’t died or fallen off the face of the earth. My computer hasn’t blown up and I didn’t loose all my fingers in some freaky teaching accident. I’ve just simply been away for a while...a long while. However, I think I’ve figured out what has happened.

You see writing has always been an escape for me. I come home, sit at the computer and lose myself in the keyboard. Whatever I happen to be writing magically lures me away to some distant land where the real world, with all its schedules and tasks and problems, can’t hope to find me. And that’s how it’s always been.

However, from late November to about this time of year, if you’re a fourth grade teacher in Texas, something changes. It’s a thing known as “The Writing TAKS Test.”

Suddenly my world transforms from a regular world to one that quite simply revolves around writing. When you come after a full day of leads and conclusions and storyboards and vivid verbs and adjectives and “exploding the moment” and revising and editing and so on and so on and so on...then, at least for me, writing has lost its ability to be an escape.

Writing and I become bitter enemies as I struggle to help little Johnny understand that every sentence must have a subject AND a predicate. Or I’m helping Betty grasp the complexities of how such a small word like “is” can be the simple predicate of an entire sentence. And then I’m trying to explain how in the sentence, “My friends and I go for a run.” The word “run” is actually a noun and not a verb. And with my next breath I find myself re-explaining why, even though a dog can walk and run and bark, the word “dog” is not a verb.

I’m hoping now that this first part of my TAKS Test season is over, writing will be able to make the transition back from a desert of solitude, which it has become, to my oasis of peace which it as always been.

I’ll just have to wait and see.