Personal: June 2005 Archive Page

On Father's Day, while we were headed east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, on our way to a family vacation in Amish country, the steering on our 1992 Taurus gave out. The car spun out in the grassy median, flipped over, and came to rest partially in a westbound lane.--Dennis G. Jerz

--What I Did on My Summer Vacation: Walked Away from This... (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This wasn't a lot of fun to experience, but if you've got to be involved in a rollover accident, I strongly recommend that you become involved in one that doesn't kill anyone.

On this blog, I don't want to talk about what might have caused the accident, and I'm not seeking advice on what to do next. Anyone who's had a close brush with death sees life as more precious.

My son dictated his description of the accident in a letter he wants me to give to his piano teacher. He ended it with, "Well, I hope you're glad we survived."

Vacation June 18-25 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Sometime this weekend, I'll be taking the wife and kids to a cabin for a week in Amish country.

Actually, that phrasing is misleading. It's more accurate to say I'll accompany my family to a cabin that my in-laws booked.

At any rate, I'll be offline the whole time... and that will be the first time I've been offline since... well, since I went online.

If I can't quickly figure out a way to hold comments for later approval, I'll have to disable the script for adding new comments until I return. I might blog a bit more today or tomorrow, but the weekend spam attacks are about to start, so I thought I might as well take care of blocking comments now.

All in all, I enjoy my job very much, and I'm thankful that in return for my work, I make enough for my family to live on (with the help of some summer work). I may not see my family as much as I'd like, but I know that what I'm doing is right for them.

But when I'm asked to do more for my job -- without additional compensation -- of course I hesitate. I need a trade-off for leaving my family. I'll teach a night class and not be there to put my children to bed because I know that the money I make from that class will pay for three months' tuition for my 8-year-old.

But ask me to give up attending that child's dance recital to stand at a table during a Saturday morning admissions fair and expect me to do it for free? Sorry. There's nothing in it for me -- nor for my family. --Chris Barnett --So, What's in It for Me? (Chronicle)

There are times when I feel this way, and other times when I truly enjoy stopping by the publications office on my way home from work, and lingering to chat and just watch the students being productive as they churn out the latest issue. Fortunately, I get a course release in order to advise the student paper, but the students do most of the hands-on work right around the time I'm supposed to be driving kids to lessons, giving baths, and reading bedtime stories. I do a lot of informal mentoring via e-mail and weblogs, and that's something I can often do from home, but it's only visible to those students who are heavy internet users.

I'm able to manage the work that I'm doing over this summer (an independent study and a more informal web project), so if you're one of my students and you're reading this, don't worry, I'm not complaining about you. But colleagues have suggested that I make sure to consider my own writing as important as my students'. Time-management, that skill that I'm supposed to be able to teach freshmen, is something that I still struggle with. I made a big mistake in putting a lot of time into marking rough drafts of final papers in one of my classes this term... a miniscule number of students actually bothered to revise it. One student put in 98 minutes of time revising an F paper and seemed to expect that it would be worth an A or B. (How do I know the revision took 98 minutes? Check out MS-Word, File -> Properties -> Statistics.) Over the course of several drafts, consultations, and e-mails, I spent almost that much time evaluating the paper. Yes, I'd like to give students a chance, but obviously I didn't manage my own resources well that time.

Right now, my daughter is running around at my feet, scribbling on post-it notes with whiteboard markers. Any minute now she's going to get bored and she's going to need my attention. I can blog knowing that any moment I'm going to have to pause in mid-word to grab something out of her hand (she just tried to throw a set of keys at my 20-inch LCD monitor), but I can't do much else. (Now Carolyn has just noticed a mole on the back of my neck, and she has asked about twelve times, "Why do you have a boo-boo?")

On top of that, some long-term research that I've been working on over the past few years has suddenly started to pay off big-time. I'm uncovering new information more quickly than I could possibly process it even if I had a full-time research assistant, and I've somehow got to do it while The Wiggles are on TV.

I chose this life, of course, so I'm not complaining -- I'm just reflecting. I won't get fired if I don't get my latest findings in a journal article this fall. Nobody will die of a disease that my findings might cure. Ecosystems won't be affected by my absence from a big national conference.

Still, at times like this I think of my alternate life. Torill Mortenson's recent "mommy moment" post makes me think. She reflects on how happy she is to have grown children. "Who needs soft marsipan-sweet cheeks and sticky paws when I can have a firm jaw and a strong hand to carry the heavy suitcase or drive the car?"

I'm not ready to give up the sweet cheeks and sticky paws -- not yet. I'm being pawed and kissed by a lollipop-slurping preschooler at the moment, so I'm signing off for now. Everything else is going to have to wait.

Mine Ears Have Heard the Tinkling of the Righteous Ice Cream Bells (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

An ice cream truck just drove by our street, playing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". It's an emotionally rousing march, but it sounded very strange in this jingly kid-attracting arrangement. Okay, it was part of a patriotic medley, but it was still uncanny.

I haven't been this creeped out by music since the time I was in an elevator and heard a mellow instrumental rendition of Michael Jackson's "Thriller".

My daughter asked whether the music was supposed to put children to sleep, and before I knew it, I was telling her that this is "the sandvan," that drives around neighborhood during naptime.

Entering Daddy Mode (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Each day this week, my nocturnal wife (a full-time home-schooling mother who never schedules anything before 11am) will get up early in the morning and head off to work.

The director of the local Suzuki music school asked her to direct a play as part of a week-long, 9-5 music camp for about 25 kids. We're counting the music camp as a full week of schooling, something Leigh would have had to put the time in to do anyway. They're paying us by letting our son attend the camp for free, and also giving him free tuition for his next set of lessons. Since the music lessons aren't cheap, we're pretty pleased with the deal.

So I'll be home with our three-year-old daughter for the whole week. One of the reasons I wanted to be a professor was because I wanted to be able to spend time with my family, and I've already been home for a couple weeks now that classes are over. It's not going to feel unusual for me to be the primary care-giver. What will be unusual is that I'll get so much time with Carolyn, without her brother and mother around.

While I'm not expecting next week to be like the Brady Bunch episode where Mike and Carol switch roles, it's been somewhat reassuring hearing my wife putting off decisions and telling people over the phone that she's stressed and can't think straight since she's been spending so much time preparing for the music camp. I always feel that way right before classes start. But here's my chance to be a supportive spouse. I'll get up in the morning to see her off, and I won't hand her a poopy baby the moment she comes in the door.

She'll have plenty of "down time" during the day, since she actually only gets a few hours of rehearsal time, and someone else will teach the kids the songs, so she's already talking about letting me take Peter there in the morning, and showing up herself around noon. And my wife says I can work in the evenings on an article that has a June 15 deadline, but I'm sure I'll still be drafted for bathtime and bedtime. But for the time being, it's pleasant to think about role-reversal.

I blogged about my son's first exposure to Suzuki music last year. Since then, I've been incredibly impressed with his progress. Last week, his teacher played a new tune for him twice on the piano, and wrote down a simplified notation that tells what finger should hit which note (A, B, C, etc.) and for how long. The next day, I asked him to play the new song for his mother, and he played it almost perfectly. (He uses a toy piano at home, so the key widths are not what he's used to in his lessons.) With practice, he can play two-handed pieces with three-finger chords.

For the show, I had suggested a kids version of 101 Dalmatians, but she opted instead for a musical on the life of George M. Cohan.