Productive Saturday Prepping @CWPFairfield Summer Programs in the Back Yard of Mt. Pleasant. We're Getting There...Slowly But Surely.

With the lack of space on campus, CWP's office has pretty much been booted to my home. It's now a storage bin for school supplies, books, and materials to work with teachers and K-12 schools. It's all good, though, as Fairfield Magazine came out this week celebrating the success of grants for CWP-Fairfield ... work that is beyond and in addition to my University responsibilities (probably why I have to do the work from home as my own administrative assistant). I love it, though. This is work for K-12 educators and their students. It's extra-special this year since our programs have been named a 2025 Divergent Award program for Literacy Innovation. We'll celebrate the hard work over the summer....over $100,000 in grants!

I'm excited to host another teacher institute, too, and to bring forward another year of Young Adult Literacy Labs. Our theme is two-fold: They Call Us Writers and Writing Our Lives - Humans Who Teach. The whole design with the grant work is to rejuvenate passion and possibilities with the teaching of writing and to support the voices of young people as we guide them to embrace their cultures, histories, narratives, and opinions. We'll publish all in the 11th edition of POW - Power of Words. Hard to believe that we've put out a book a year since we redesigned our programs. I keep calling it a formative experiment but after a decade of success, I believe it's an experiment that works!

But it is on my back, as I sit at my back patio unpacking boxes, creating writer's notebooks, and organizing materials into bins. I was on campus today, too, grabbing more boxes that were delivered (many of them just left in the hall....glad I went in). 

This week culminates the first of two graduate courses I'm teaching and I'm looking forward to call this to an end. Love the students, cherish the standards and design, but our faculty voted to remove the course expectations. They won't need to be taught after this year...at least not by me. Interesting, too, that the majority of people behind the redesign have jumped ship. We shall see where this all goes.

I'm loving the theme and books chosen for the summer and can't wait to get them going and moving along.  Also thrilled to teach the writing of so many of my friend, too. 

Ah, but it's Father's Day and and I always have loved this one of Dad and Chitunga...beers in each hand. I know from my Iowa visit that the kid misses his Tuesday/Fridays with Papi Butch at Chubby's. Here's to the Dads out there....everywhere.