So somehow I neglected to commemorate in full splendour my five-year bloggiversary which was sometime last week, as like Friday as not. As you might be able to tell, I’ve been doing my best summer to resume my daily pace now that the usual excuse of not having consistent access is gone. I won’t bother now to revisit in detail where I was at five years ago–such exercises are moot at such an intermediate distance. More sobering, perhaps, is that this is the year of my tenth high school graduation anniversary, or somesuch. I be getting old.

Today was a leisurely morning with Mark as he made coffee for me and the fungus gnats and we browsed various titanium rings and their associated diamonds from past and present and then my new routine of morning calisthenics before digging up call the CST books which I’ve been leaving by the bed|wayside in order to try and make some headway this week. Making my way to Rob Chin’s for some carne guisada y pernil was the right taken, as somehow on that blacktop roof of his I managed to make some progress on how I way join that faux-cult. In particular, I think that the ways in which this will help what I’m trying to write about (social justice curriculum and course for Latino immigrant students and Spanish speakers) is to re-envision discourse in terms of limits and forms rather than the process of production. That is, looking at “what can be said” in the context of such an academic course, as opposed to affinity grouping or somesuch; looking then further at the notion of the “archive” as a methodological question: how will this ed research be conducted, while keeping in mind the injunction to ever pluralize–to see discourses, discontinuities, and resistances. The irony in all of this might be the ways in which social justice curriculum seeks to convert an informal set of practices into a more scientific or rationalized process–just add the water of our discontent? So maybe not that much progress, but at least I’m working on it.

The GC, meanwhile, is surprisingly hopping during the summer, or at least the library is as most of the faculty is on vacation and no one has summer classes. I’m rewired here and will be glad to use this as a bonus office, even though I will need to deal with MS Office 2007.

So it’s been a good long while, and year six of teaching is over, but I can’t say that I’m very relieved. Today at least, I’m trying to kick the third quarter off right, but I’m a little ill at ease when it comes to that mix of career and school. In part this is because I’ve still not finished this paper on the ways in which critical social theory (no capitals, e.g. Foucault, Bourdieu, Gramsci, et al.) can inform educational research. For that, one would need an actual question or context–the exercise, without the data to frame it is just an exercise. It also doesn’t help that every Latino I sent to take the Regents failed. What does that say? Sure, maybe I’m not preparing them enough for the tests, but what am I really accomplishing? Two half asses don’t add up to one.

Things to think about as I do my best to build new summer habits.