It's November, So My Mind Is Working In Charts, Graphs, and Tables, Because It is Literacy Conference Season

I was up at 6 a.m. yesterday, knowing I had an 8:30 a.m. phone call with collaborators who will be presenting with me in Tampa in December (okay, I admit that my dissertation chair still has a hold on me and makes me a better scholar than I ever thought I'd be. I wanted to be on my B+ game before we had a call).

The skinny is that I am crunching data from six years of Young Adult Literacy Labs and teacher institutes and I have material that is overwhelming. Harnessing that information in a way that teaches me and tells me what the evidence reveals requires synthesis, analysis, crunching, revisiting, positioning, naming, refuting and readdressing. We have to ask ourselves, "But what is this information really telling us? And how does this add to, agree with, or contradict what researchers before us have claimed?"

I have to admit, I love this work, and my only complaint is that I've been so busy doing and implementing, that I haven't taken the time to actually crunch all the materials I've collected and so it is papers like this that stop me in my place and say, "Crandall. Get your #$@# together. It is time."

Truth be told, I've applied for sabbatical so I can work with this data and, with teachers, compose a book that I think will be extremely useful to K-12 writing teachers and those who want to use Young Adult literature and the National Writing Project to achieve phenomenal written outcomes with their students. This is work born out of NWP, Kentucky's portfolio assessment, work with refugee-background youth, research in K-12 schools, professional development in K-12 schools, Writing Our Lives work, and CWP's summer programs. I'm in a unique space to have incredible information laid out before my eyes (and catalogued in folders over the last six years).

Yesterday morning's phone call helped me to see how important it is to graph, calculate, document, record, name and compare the written outcomes that resulted from CWP's work.

And to say I went to bed exhausted is an understatement. After the phone call, there were a few hours of NCTE work, followed by another few hours of writing for another project, followed by a graduate course. When I got home at 10 p.m. I thought, what will I write about this morning.

Well, I am writing about yesterday, and today, I will move ahead with everything else that needs to be done.