The weight of tomorrow.

I took an hour-long nap today on a couch in Waterfield for no other reason than I couldn't make it home before I fell asleep. That was a strange experience. It was one of the best naps ever, and I took it while about a hundred people milled around me, getting their homework done.

I got three interlibrary loan books today. One of which I don't need anymore because it relates to research topic number two. I've opted for research topic version 3.5. I am glad practicum is almost over because I am actually quite excited about examining Sandra Cisneros and her book The House on Mango Street within the new American canon. It involves both of my majors and education, even. Hopefully I can stay motivated.

One of my professors is coming to observe me teaching tomorrow. It will be my last day at the school. I am a little stressed -- surprise, surprise -- because today's class got out of control. I am going to have to do an unexpected lesson tomorrow on how to use and to cite sources. Great fun.

This has been a great learning experience for me. I know that I have a long way to go to become an effective teacher (ooh, that phrasing feels like the product of being brainwashed by the teacher preparation program), and I am excited about having my own classroom with my own students to teach. I worry, though, how much I am making an impact on these students' futures while I thrash about, making a trial-and-error process of their educations. I wonder, after a week of making them think about their opinons on immigration, are they still closed minded? Tomorrow is my last chance -- or last cha, if you will -- to see to it that I'll be leaving these students in a better state than I found them.

The weight of tomorrow just got heavier.

I can't believe it, but it is true.

• I just taught an English II class for four days. Almost successfully.
• My best friend forever slash is on the road right now, less than two hours from Murray!
• The same man for whom I've driven over 2,000 miles (total round trip nileage) to see over the past few years, the same man who is on the cover of this week's Rolling Stone named as a Guitar God, the same man who just won 2 Grammy awards on Sunday is in this town right now. Murray. Kentucky.

Hold the apples, at least for a few more minutes.

It's Saturday night, and I'm getting ready to make a Viewing Guide to go along with a ChannelOne video series called "Crossing the Border." I've already make a grade book, a rather detailed assignment sheet explaining how to "picture a poem" using Google Images and PowerPoint, a unit anticipation guide, a unit reflection guide, a scoring guide for the reflection guide... The list goes on. All of this is only a portion of what I've done (and what I've yet to do) in preparation for teaching an English II class for a little over a week. One class. One week. And I haven't even taught yet.

I don't like how this bodes for my future.

But who am I kidding? I actually enjoy all of this, and I think working with the students -- all this planning in action -- will be fun, too. Even if the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Hopefully I can deal.

Last night, I was watching the 10 o'clock news at my sister's house. When the sports segment came on, I found myself engrossed in the report on the Calloway County versus Graves County boys' basketball game. Who knew I cared? But oh, how I did when I saw one of "my" students on the ol' television making a play. I was so proud, and I haven't even taught the kid yet.

Sometimes it makes me wonder if this really is what I'm supposed to be doing with my life. Not that I've even started yet. And not that I hadn't been planning it all along.

There's a reason I love IMDB.

Eighteen-year-old Zach Braff. And to think, I remember watching this episode of Babysitters Club. I didn't have a clue I'd fall for the geeky (or as they say, "really cute, don't you think?") David Cummings, like, twelve years later.

Enjoy the flashback.

It's not you; it's me.

Just this past semester, I wrote on the front of one of my classes' folders: I HATE POETRY. It wasn't true, even then. Maybe it was the class, the professor, the specific poem that we were harassing as a group. Or rather, it was the way the professor was using the poem to harass us that made me write it in capital letters, to emphasize my disgust. That's the thing. Over the past years as a literature student, I've come to view poetry as a weapon scholars use to batter us intellectual fledglings into humble submission.

It makes me sad. So much so that a couple years ago, I wrote a research paper about ways to make poetry seem less intimidating in the classroom. Hoping that students and poetry can be friends, I decided that the microteaching that I have to deliver in a couple weeks ought to be about poetry. So I set out on the search to find the poem to incorporate into my lesson. I still haven't found a poem I want to "teach," but I have found my new favorite poet.

Introducing Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate and NY State Poet, and his poem "Thesaurus."

It could be the name of a prehistoric beast
that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up
on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,
or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.

It means treasury, but it is just a place
where words congregate with their relatives,
a big park where hundreds of family reunions
are always being held,
house, home, abode, dwelling, lodgings, and digs,
all sharing the same picnic basket and thermos;
hairy, hirsute, woolly, furry, fleecy, and shaggy
all running a sack race or throwing horseshoes,
inert, static, motionless, fixed and immobile
standing and kneeling in rows for a group photograph.

Here father is next to sire and brother close
to sibling, separated only by fine shades of meaning.
And every group has its odd cousin, the one
who traveled the farthest to be here:
astereognosis, polydipsia, or some eleven
syllable, unpronounceable substitute for the word tool.
Even their own relatives have to squint at their name tags.

I can see my own copy up on a high shelf.
I rarely open it, because I know there is no
such thing as a synonym and because I get nervous
around people who always assemble with their own kind,
forming clubs and nailing signs to closed front doors
while others huddle alone in the dark streets.

I would rather see words out on their own, away
from their families and the warehouse of Roget,
wandering the world where they sometimes fall
in love with a completely different word.
Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever
next to each other on the same line inside a poem,
a small chapel where weddings like these,
between perfect strangers, can take place.

See, I don't hate poetry. Thank God, because this stuff makes me happy.

It was this passage from the poem "Reading Myself to Sleep" that had me at hello: "and the only movement in the night is the slight / swirl of curtains, the easy lift and fall of my breathing, / and the flap of pages as they turn in the wind of my hand." Aaaah.

So now I'm going to go put fresh sheets on my bed and read myself to sleep.