A Great Quote

I love this quote from Jack Kerouac: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars... ” I saw it when I escorted young adult author Rosemary Clement-Moore to visit a classroom at my school today after a whole school assembly. She was great! She talked to the students about Gothic novels and about writing. Her visit was a big success. I recommend her most recent book Texas Gothic to anyone who likes ghost stories and a little teen romance.

Back to the quote, I really do love it--so much that I put it in my right sidebar. (This quote reminds me of Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night," one of my favorite poems.) I want to be one of the mad people even though I'm not sure about the "mad to be saved" meaning. Really, though, I'm too self-conscious to be one of the mad ones. I wish it weren't true, but I know that it is. Don't get me wrong. I love life and try to live it to the fullest in my own little ways, but I do spend a great deal of time worrying about what other people think and second guessing myself. Sometimes I do talk madly, but I often end up saying something that doesn't make sense or worrying that I've said something to offend someone listening.

Okay, I thought I was going to write more, but then I updated my iPhone to OS5 and got to caught up in Criminal Minds. Now, I've lost all motivation to write. The show is just about over. Guess it's time to go to bed and read for a while. Later.

An Off Task Discovery

So, I'm sitting in a staff development session about research tips, which should have been a good choice for me to make. HOWEVER, this session was originally created for 4th grade teachers doing a certain project in their classes. The session's description was very general with no mention of grade levels. The district tech person teaching this session was very upset when she realized last night/this morning that the participants are two first grade teachers, one middle school GT teacher, and one junior high librarian (me). I feel sorry for her, and she's trying very hard to fit her presentation to our needs, but I'm really having a hard time staying on task--honestly, though, I generally have a hard time staying on task anyway.

So here's one thing that I've been doing: I checked out this article from School Library Journal that I saw a tweet about this morning: Cool Tools: Visual presentations make it easier for students to tackle data and difficult text. One of the sites mentioned in the article was Tagul.com, which is a word cloud creator. It's cool! I might like it better than Wordle.net. Each word in the cloud becomes a search term when you click the word, and you can filter common words, which I did. Click here to what I made using the URL from this blog. I tried to place the cloud here, but I couldn't figure out how to make it fit the space.