Daylight Saving Time Once Again - With Bibles!

As today is the time of year to set the clocks ahead one hour in honor of Daylight Saving Time (Thanks Ben Franklin, for more summer time to be outside) I thought I would pull out a post on the topic written two years ago. Would love to have you opine in the comments. This post was originally written on March 9, 2009.

DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME...WITH BIBLES!

As we cruised up the highway on the 40 minute commute this morning, the wife and I were having a discussion concerning daylight saving time. It went something like this...

Wife: (yawn) I am really super tired this morning.

Me: Hrmm. (While driving and reading a Tweet on the phone at the same time...an activity I don't recommend)

Wife: I said, I am really super tired this morning.

Me: (Putting the phone down and concentrating on the road before I plunge the three of us into a fiery death) Why is that?

Wife: Well the clock on the dash says that it is 7:00, but the internal clock in my body is telling me it is really 6:00 so I am pretty tired.

Grooming Future Scribblers or Kids, Writing Doesn't HAVE to Suck!

I have been a devoted fan of writing since my heady days in the third and fourth grades when a few friends and I took pencil to paper to create our own (illustrated!) series of Choose Your Own Adventure stories and Doctor Who fan fiction (chicks dug us...HARD). It is an activity I have continued to enjoy (and even make an infinitesimal amount of money at) ever since.

Because of this long lasting affection for the written word, I take particular joy in the teaching of writing to my class of fifth graders. They come to me in late August, almost always completely united in their collective hatred of the craft I myself enjoy so much. If given a choice between writing a page long story or having a few cavities filled, many of them would gladly pull up the dentist chair, attach the little blue drool-bib themselves, and open wide.

With the fervent desire of the rabidly fundamentalist, I see it as my duty to change as many of these minds as I can over the course of the school year. To get my students to see writing not as some brutal holdover from the medieval torture chamber days, but as a worthwhile, artistic (they don't call it language ARTS for no reason), and dare I even suggest it, FUN, way to express themselves.