The Blackhawk Ride, One Year Later

Yesterday Doug and I rode the long hilly route of the Blackhawk Country Roads ride from Rockton, IL, into southern Wisconsin, 65 miles. This is a beautiful ride, well routed on side roads with almost no traffic. Long stretches of quiet woods, farms, open fields, lovely views. I love hilly rides because of the scenery - but I'm learning to love the hills with my legs, too.

Last year I was training for TOMRV, my first long challenging ride - and we went on this same ride for the conditioning. I was just starting to get the feel of a longer cycling day then. I wasn't used to sitting on a bike for hours at a time, and my body was still quite surprised at being required to continue this kind of exertion for so long. For the last 10 miles of a day of 60 or 70 miles, I would be completely exhausted, desperate to just finish the ride. And this ride, the Blackhawk Ride, has some pretty serious hills. Last year Doug tried to coach me how to ride the hills, to get momentum on the approach, to use the short rollers efficiently, to stand up and pump on a steeper hill. I tried as best I could to follow his instructions, but I was mostly too tired to process much of what he was trying to teach me.

Well, what a difference a year makes. Even though I am not training as deliberately this year, I am a much more efficient rider. My legs have learned a lot about climbing hills. I am starting to learn where it will pay off to invest my energy in speed, and where to just let the hill slow me down, because it will anyway, and relax and take my time. There's a kind of giving in to the hill that makes sense sometimes. I'd like to have my knees last a few more years. I really enjoyed those hills yesterday - liked feeling the changes in my riding skills in those moment-to-moment decisions about how to shift gears, when to stand. I loved the feeling of speed and rhythm on the rollers, the satisfaction of making it to the top of the long slow hills, the reward of the panorama at the top.

I also noticed yesterday how there are levels to tiredness, and I can begin to manage my own experience of the tiredness somewhat. This is something I could never have learned without doing an endurance sport. I was starting to feel tired after the first 15 miles, and that worried me a little. I slowed down a bit, told Doug I was pacing myself for the distance, and really paid attention to where I was investing hard work. I drafted off Doug in one windy stretch and got a little rest. Eventually I realized, though, how little meaning that first level of tiredness really has. If I ride at a decent pace for an hour, I'll start to feel that in my legs, and I experience it as getting tired - but that's not even a quarter of the day's distance. So, as I found yesterday, there are much deeper reserves of strength in my legs, and a really different kind of tiredness comes later. I felt the real tiredness after 45 miles - but instead of being exhausted and desperate to make it to the end, I was just, well, tired.

Tired and happy. The last 10 miles yesterday were still fun.

Mom to Laura

Questions to ask yourself when considering whether a relationship is a good one to be in / stay in:

Do you like the person you show up as, when you're together? Do you feel clear in who you are when you are with her? Does she treat you like you are the kind of person you want to be? Does she treat you like you are her toy? Does she make threats or impose conditions? Does it feel like she wants to control you?

How well does she take care of herself? Does she eat and sleep enough? Does she show consideration for her family and communicate well with them? Does she participate in the give-and-take of healthy family life? Does she take responsibility for herself, her well-being, her choices, her future? Does she have worthy goals for her life? Is she making good plans? Is she making good decisions?

Does she have other good relationships with friends her own age and with adults who can mentor her? Does she listen to and act on wise advice from peers and mentors? Does she seek out help when she needs it, and does she seek help from the right kinds of people, depending on the kind of help she needs?

Does she know herself well, see herself clearly, see how others see her? Can she see other people's points of view, and accept them if they are different from her own? Can she learn from other people's points of view? Can she learn from you? Can you learn from her?

What do you like (and not like) about her? Can you grow as a person while you are part of this relationship? Does it bring out the best in you? What does she contribute to you? In the long run, will you be a better, happier person if you stay in this relationship?

be a grownup - a rant

I'm tired of Laura's dad writing me nasty emails about how I am doing such a bad job bringing up my daughter. I'm tired of calmly requesting that he moderate his tone and address me respectfully. I'm tired of reminding him that he should check out the facts of any given situation before he jumps to conclusions and goes on the attack. Why do I have to bring him up, too?? He had a mother. He's a grownup now. He should act like one.

He should be smart enough to know that the parents of a teenager should support each other, not attack each other. He should be smart enough to know that I'm not interested in his feelings or his needs - we have been divorced for years, for the love of god. He should be smart enough to know that taking care of Laura in the best way we can is the only good use of any time we spend communicating with each other. Any time I have to spend explaining to him, again, how to be nice and play fair is time I could spend doing something more valuable. He should know that I am doing the best I can to raise my daughter and that if I'm not perfect it's because I am human and I can't do it all by myself.

Not that he has any time to act like a father. No. Despite the urgency of his last email (it was so urgent that he also text-messaged it to me) about how I'm not up to scratch as a mother, and how we need to have a meeting, he is not available until two weeks from now. Nice to know what a high priority parenting is for you, dude. Good of you to rearrange your world.

mother's day

Noticing my level of neutrality about this holiday, now almost 21 years after my mother's death. I think of her gently, I guess, maybe even peacefully. For years, I grieved for her in unexpected sudden waves that would strike suddenly, bring me to my knees, but I haven't had one of those in a long time.

I have so many years of being a mother myself by now that the holiday has taken on that cast - although Laura and I do not have a big tradition about it. We seem to resist big traditions, which I note can turn into big obligations, burdens, and guilt trips. Better not to go there. We make it up year by year. We change. We want different things. We are tied in with each other, but loosely, somehow. This seems like a good thing. I want her tied in, but I want her to feel her freedom growing. I see her growing, see how I need to prepare her for more and more freedom. It's an awkward and uneven process. She messed up using the CTA card at the El station yesterday - she wasn't paying attention. "Read what it says," I was testy. Oh well. A small thing, a tiny learning - you have to pay attention to the readout on the turnstile. A person who goes on the CTA independently needs to know that very small thing, and now she does. Someday soon she will go on the El by herself. And either she will, or she won't, pay attention to what she's doing, and she may keep herself safe, or she may learn something else, maybe hard, maybe easy.

She's not a little girl in a bubble of rules, padding and safety straps, adult supervision. She is starting to get around on her own.

Happy mother's day to me.

why don't *I* try harder??

In a self-justifying mood after writing that post yesterday.... But I am trying to figure out how I could get my students to see the gap between their efforts and the higher level of quality that I want them to aspire to, without making more work for myself. Seems like it could be done by shifting the work. I don't see how I can do more conferences or grade more homework. But I could do conferences earlier, and I could do them a little differently, maybe by showing them where they are falling short right on the grading rubric. When I requested my fall schedule, I said I was on a roll with this course. I did a lot of things right, and I have built a lot of stuff into Blackboard already -- I can keep building on that and make it stronger. I know more about what works now.

Blah blah blah I don't know why I am writing this here. What is the point of this blog anyway, I'm just talking to myself, this is just turning into another way of journaling but letting Google do the storage instead of filling up my bookcase. What the hell. I don't know. Who cares, I can just do this however I want, that's what it's for.

Ok, so if this posting is really just for ME, then this is what I want to remember from what I'm thinking about right now:

• Conferences should be earlier - hopefully before midterm.
  
• The conference draft of the long paper should be shorter, 5 pages or so, and it should have very specific requirements--at least five sources cited, the lead written, the purpose established, the most important background sources included.
• The conference should introduce the rubric, probably with some elements grayed out to show that they will be added for the final version.
• The conference draft should be graded and should count for about 20% of the final course grade.
• More chapter quizzes to encourage reading the textbook.
• Figure out how to automate warnings for required assignments that they miss.
• Add Source Check as a graded required assignment.
• Establish that they have to use MyCOD email through Bb.

why don't they try harder?

Today I am reflecting on my students' apparent unwillingness to try hard. I don't like to be too judgmental in how I think about this. They have enormous competing demands on their time and energy. I know that some of them are not really sure they even want to be in college at all. But as I am grading final papers for English 1102, I wonder what they have been telling themselves this semester as they willfully chose not to do, or not to learn how to do, what they were assigned to do, often to a very large extent.

I'm not really willing to forgive this in assigning grades on this essay. We spent most of a semester writing one 10-page paper. Why should they pass that paper easily? They shouldn't.

What mystifies me, I guess, is what I did wrong - but is this the real mystery? Maybe it isn't. Maybe I'm just way too quick to assume that if they are not working hard, it has to be my fault. They make choices. They learn lessons. Maybe one lesson they can learn is that it really is possible to get a D on a paper that we spent all those weeks working on... or NOT working on, as the case may be.

I really, really wish they cared more about the quality of their work. It is painful to me to read a badly flawed paper that could have been so much better, if only the student had done the work I assigned. Gosh, it seems so simple when I write it down this way. They made their choices - now they have to live with the results. Ouch. Adulthood - it can be cold sometimes.

hunger

I have writing hunger. It's back. Is it because it's spring?? I have no time for this. I am supposed to be grading papers. I am supposed to be getting ready for teaching today. I am not even dressed, and it's already after 8am. The radio is spewing traffic reports and news of the day, and I am sitting in front of my open patio door with the chill on my feet and the sunny spring morning spilling in to make me alive, thinking that suddenly I MUST GET MY BLOG GOING AGAIN. Oh dear. Panic. What is the blog for. Am I a cyclist blogger, a teacher blogger, a mom blogger, can I be all of the above, oh shit. I will bore myself to death with this pretty fast so I better give it up, post this terrible paragraph, just to say to myself (because nobody else is gonna read it), the blog is back.