The Huntsville-Madison County Public Library System is holding The Big Read, in which the city reads one book. This year’s book is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I just returned from tonight’s event, in which Alabama historian Wayne Flint discussed the historical reality of Alabama in the 1930s. At one point he asked everyone who had read the book to raise their hands.

I raised my hand, but strictly speaking, I haven’t read it. I had it read to me. One summer when we lived in a little camper in Texas, my dad read To Kill a Mockingbird to Andrew and me. We would huddle in the bunk bed that was crammed against the roof at the front of the camper, listening to Harper Lee’s prose while the Texas heat seeped in through the walls. Whenever I think of that book, I hear my dad’s voice, reading it softly to me.

I’m curious: have you read To Kill a Mockingbird?

These are some cool things that happened today:

1. I finished all my baby thank you notes before the upcoming showers on Saturday and the one following quickly on Tuesday. It’s good to get one set all done before they start really piling up.

2. LanaBob! posted this on her site. It’s sappy but very sweet and gave me the warm fuzzy.

3. Eli wrote his name all by himself tonight as I was working on the above mentioned thank you notes. He asked me to help and so I gave him instructions and here is what he did:

I had to darken it considerably because he wrote it so lightly on the back of a printed page so that’s why it looks like this.

This is called an Eli Sandwich. It’s a variant of Stephen and me hugging Eli between the two of us and yelling “Eli Sandwich!” Either situation invokes many, many giggles.

Eli wondered into the office at bedtime tonight like this. Stephen and I had to prop each other up while laughing. We are so on top of the oral hygiene around here.

I expect the last three words of this sentence will bring back horrible memories of school for most of you: five paragraph essay. It’s one of those pedagogical tools that, thanks to its use on standardized tests, has taken root like kudzu, spreading throughout US high schools and resisting attempts to get rid of it. Its formulaic structure lends itself to writing without thinking, and its ease of use means a lot of teachers don’t go any further in teaching writing.

The five paragraph essay is a triumph of organization over, well, everything else. That’s the main reason it’s used in classrooms. When you first start writing, you don’t know how to organize your thoughts, or even that you should. Five paragraph essays make that task easier. Writing wraps your thinking up in a package you can hand to others, and organizing that writing brings the package together. In that sense, the five paragraph essay is a shoebox. It’s tidy, easy to carry, and stacks well, a convenience for teachers with thirty essays to grade. But I wouldn’t pack my clothes inside shoeboxes for a vacation, or store our one thousand books in them. Not all thoughts fit into a five paragraph essay.

Even for those that do, the essay’s structure can be a crutch, discouraging developing those thoughts further. Once you learn the five paragraph formula you can apply it over and over and over again, dutifully composing a thesis sentence, dropping in three supporting paragraphs, and wrapping it up with a concluding paragraph. By the end of high school I could fart a five paragraph essay. I never took an English class in college thanks to the five paragraph essays I wrote for the freshman composition test. At no time, though, did I truly learn to develop those thoughts beyond what was needed for a minimally-competent five paragraph essay. I’m not the only student to have that experience, either.

Yes, class time is limited. Yes, five paragraph essays teaches organization. Yes, five paragraph essays are the easiest form of essay writing. But they’re training wheels. At some point they need to be left behind. Five paragraph essays can be the first step in learning how to compose; they shouldn’t be the last. If only they weren’t used on standardized tests like state achievement exams and my college’s freshman composition test. Teachers have to teach to tests, and that leads to them emphasizing the form to the exclusion of most any other. The result: students who can, if pressed, write in a form that doesn’t exist outside of junior high and high school, but who can’t do any other kind of critical writing.

Five paragraph essays may be the triumph of organization over content, of facile writing over critical thinking, of convenience over skill. Regardless, I have hope that they will not reign forever. The College Board announced that of all essays written for the SAT from March 2005 to January 2006, only 8 percent used a five paragraph structure. If we’re lucky, those students made a conscious choice not to use the five paragraph structure. If not, I know what kind of SAT preparation skills I’ll be marketing.

As promised, here are photos of the shelving extravaganza.

Pre-shelves.

Painting process.

The first wall bracket installed.

Stephen doing the hardest part, pounding the brackets onto the wall pieces.

Placing shelves.

Left side of shelves. (My side.)

Right side of shelves. (Stephen’s side.)

Those are all the books from under the guest bed. It seemed like so many when they were under there. But now there’s so much room to grow!

UPDATE:
I had to take some more photos after I had fiddled around and put more stuff on the shelves…I’m such a homemaker nerd.

My side. Two good things here. 1. My diploma which I’ve always wanted to have on display. 2. On the second shelf from the bottom is a stack of empty notebooks. Never let me con you and say that I have nothing to write on. To the left of that stack, my ink for my fountain pen. Never let me con you and say I have nothing to write with.

Stephen’s side. Note Stephen’s shelf o’ toys, which he has never had in one place.

Baby TBA’s name is to be Kathryn Elizabeth Granade. We’ll call her Liza, at least until she tells us her name is Elizabeth or Kate or Athr.

Well my appointments are now on Tuesdays instead of Thursdays so this was a very short week. But the short week came with big news. I got one of my regular nurses (I’ve not been seeing my regular nurses because they are tied to the doctor so since my doctor has been out, I’ve not seen them in a while) and she was appalled that I was this far along and didn’t have good confirmation of the gender. She hustled me to an ultrasound room and the tech managed to get a good shot.

It is indeed a girl as we suspected. So it is no longer Baby TBA but a girl baby with an actual girl name. Since I haven’t asked Stephen if we can divulge that to the population at large, the name will have to be a separate post. (I might even let him make it.) You’ve waited this long, you can wait a bit longer.

All is well with the both of us. Good blood pressure, heartbeat, etc. I am starting to feel like a house but usually that’s only at night after I’ve been up all day long doing stuff. I want to sleep all the time which now that I think about, my time would be better spent napping than typing on the computer so g’night to you all.

As you might have gathered, Eli and I survived the weekend unscathed. We didn’t do what I threatened Misty with, namely, sitting around with me in my boxers and Eli in his diaper, grunting at sports on TV. Instead we did pansy things like bake brownies and go to the library and stomp around in rain puddles.

A few years before Eli was born, one of Misty’s acquaintances said something like, “I could never leave my kids with their dad. He’s hopeless. He’d let them fall down the stairs and kill themselves.” We swore that wasn’t going to be the case with us, if for no other reason than we didn’t have stairs in our house. But I was going to be able to take care of Eli by myself.

Then Eli came and we discovered how hard that was. Misty was his primary care-giver for reasons of biology and circumstance. It took time before she felt comfortable leaving him with me, and I felt helpless because I didn’t know all of his signals. Why is he crying? Is he hungry? Is he mad? ARE THERE EVIL SPIRITS IN HIM? And Misty’s inclination was to take him from me and deal with him, because she understood him and could fix what was wrong quickly.

(Before you’re a parent, you wonder about things like, “Why can’t parents just wash their hands so they don’t catch colds from their kids?” and “How hard can it be to stay friends with people after you have a kid — just because you’re a parent doesn’t mean your life’s over!” Afterwards, you think, “I was an idiot.”)

I eventually became better at keeping Eli, enough that Misty was willing to leave him with me for extended periods of time. And by this time I knew what to do: have a whole lot of activities lined up so you can keep your kid from becoming bored and can run him to exhaustion. It worked like a charm!

I did have one moment of panic. I was on the phone with Andrew and Joy, who had called to make sure I hadn’t burned down the house. Eli was measuring things with a small six-inch ruler. “The door is seventy inches long. This lamp is seventy inches long. The carpet is seventy inches long.” He climbed up on the guest bed, said, “Watch this!” and proceeded to fall back onto the bed. His head missed the headboard by less than an inch.

Hey, dad, remember when you took me to your office and I got acquainted with your typewriter? Now I truly know how you felt.

Well, I’ve returned and had a fine trip. LanaBob! visited another friend in Birmingham and then drove up on Friday. We left to go to Nashville on Saturday morning. It was a total gabfest from the moment we got in the car here until the moment we got out of the car here.

LanaBob! was unfortunately subjected to a great number of super gross and not-so-gross baby related topics that she suffered through gracefully. Missy (mother of three, yes, three girls!) brought Terry and me four boxes of girly baby clothes and they are beautiful. Some of them are so cute, I may put my kid in them even if it’s a boy.

Terry’s new house is gorgeous and frankly big enough to double as a bed and breakfast.

The only downer of the whole weekend was that we were going to go to The Melting Pot on Saturday night but we didn’t call for reservations soon enough to get in. Dinner was still good but it wasn’t The Melting Pot. We’ll know better next time.

I think we are going to try very hard to all get together again before another seven years elapse.

Missy, Me, LanaBob! & Terry

I returned to a clean house AND the boys had managed to finish the shelves in the office and put the books up from under the bed. I’ll post photos of that soon. They also had a great time and seemed happy to see me when I returned.

As Misty mentioned earlier in the week, she is off on a weekend trip, leaving me here with Eli.

By myself.

With Eli.

I’m sure it will go okay, but I’ve been here with him for less than an hour and I’m already out of things to do. We made brownies and played on the bed and played with money and tried some coloring and thought about reading but Eli wasn’t interested. Right now he’s playing in the living room by himself, but that won’t last. It won’t. I know it won’t.

Oh no, here he comes! Here he