Journal #1: The Artifact.

A drumstick.

To those who know me, it's a sensible object to represent who I am: a musician, a director, one whose aim is true and is chiseled -- but not broken -- through the cuts and pock marks of experience.

But the drumstick represents so much more than that, especially when it relates to teaching.  For the past 16 years, I have been (both formally and informally) banging on different instruments to create rhythm and sound.  You know, drumming.  Music has been an enormous part of my life, be it practicing, writing, or performing.  Just as this drumstick, my tool of choice, is my sword for conquering practicing, writing, and performing, its aim and chiseled sides also represent how I practice my lessons before I enact them, how I write curriculum and assessments before I follow them, and how I perform in the classroom in front of my students.

Although these connections may seem ethereal or intangible, I believe that this drumstick most clearly represents the bridge connecting my professional craft and my personal art: connecting with kids.  By both teaching English (read: "responsibility") and music, I have the unique opportunity to connect with my kids like elementary school teachers do, through multiple subjects.  On the surface, my dual teaching threat allows me to better relate to my colleagues in both Language Arts and the performing arts and to better relate to my artistic kids in the English classroom or my linguistically-minded kids in the studio.  On a deeper level, however, the bridge that I can create through teaching both middle school English and high school music affords me much better connections that continue to solidify the foundation of my professional life.  That bridge allows me to follow my middle school students to high school, to serve as a mentor of different capacities for potentially five full years.  That bridge affords me the opportunity to forge stronger connections with parents who begin to see me as more than just a classroom teacher, confined to the standards of eighth grade English that I teach, but as a "parent away from home" who spends time during the school day and after the school day to share thousands of lessons on multiple topics with their children -- much like they do at home.  Best of all, that bridge enables me to practice what I preach when it comes to creating an eighth grade experience that transcends the difficulties of the high school transition and "bridges" the frightening chasm between middle school and high school.

So, yes, on the surface, the drumstick is a sensible object that reflects who I am.  But its deeper meanings connect the values of my personal life to those of my professional life.