I am a middle school Language Arts (what they used to call English) teacher in Florida who is also a cartoonist, sometimes novelist, author of a book for teachers, amateur theologian, animation buff, reading junky, father of two, husband, and... well probably a lot of other things that will come into play eventually.
This blog will not be strictly about teaching, mainly because I find it very difficult to compartmentalize my life. I teach all day, and it's my job. But my wife (whose blog is at oldnewteacher.blogspot.com) also teaches Language Arts at my school, so that compartment is gone. My two children, grades 6 and 8, also attend our middle school-- and they are both in my class this year. The wall between the "teacher" and "father" compartments is pretty thin.
I draw a comic strip 5 times a week for the Daytona Beach News-Journal called "Mr. Fitz" (www.mrfitz.com), that is about-- you guessed it-- a middle school Language Arts teacher. Mr. Fitz has two kids and wife, so my family also winds up in the strip. I wrote a young adult novel called Making My Escape a few years ago, and I now teach it to my students. I just had a book for teachers published by Scholastic Professional books called Writing Extraordinary Essays which contains my ideas about teaching writing to middle-schoolers. It also contains 84 of my cartoons, uses work samples from my students (including my son), and is dedicated to my wife.
I find it very hard to separate the various parts of my life. Maybe this is bad. It can occasionally be inconvenient. But mostly it's good. I tend to see connections everywhere-- not just between the different areas of my life, but different areas of... well, everything. I see patterns everywhere, connections everywhere, and not all of it fits well into Mr. Fitz. Hence my starting a blog. I may go off on education issues, on something theological, on books I love or books I hate, on movies, on political issues (though I am non-partisan in public and apolitical by nature) that affect my life.
And I will always try to make it specific. This blog is called word pictures guy because word pictures, words and pictures, pictures and words, all seem to be a big thing for me right now. When I teach my students to write, I tell them they must create word pictures: Not "The teacher was angry," but "The teacher slammed down a dictionary, threw an eraser across the room, tipped over a stool, and yelled 'I'm not going to take this any more.'" You can see that. The new, second book I am writing for Scholastic is all about word pictures. Every day I sit down at my drawing board and create a combination of words and pictures with my comic strip. And so I will always try to pin what I'm writing about to something specific.
Tonight I am sitting in a brown recliner in my living room in Florida, typing on my relatively new Gateway laptop and listening to a Star Trek soundtrack that's loaded on the hard drive. I'm wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Earlier this evening I finished a chapter of a novel called Portents that I'm writing with my twelve year old son. After I finish this blog, I'll work on my lesson plans, write down scripts for my October comic strips, and then hang out with my wife. A little writing, a little drawing, a little down time. No compartments. Flow.
Until next time...
