And home.

It's been a heavyweight week, not least because I have been sleeping terribly. Even last night, in my own bed, sleep was fractured and uneasy; and after three nights of this, I'm beginning to droop. Thank goodness today I have some control of my own schedule. If I fall asleep at 10 a.m., so be it.

I've been thinking this week about authority in the classroom: what it means to construct a classroom environment within which liberty can exist. As in a poem, structure creates a frame for independence. They are a strange dichotomy, fences and freedom.

During lunch yesterday, one of my Monson students shared a poem she'd written in response to a school assignment, a typical honors-class sort--"write either a Petrarchan or a Shakespearean sonnet with strict scansion and rhyme and a precisely placed volta." She was irritated by the task, but also challenged by it, and the result was a solid traditional sonnet with a precisely place volta in which the speaker ranted about how much she hated writing it. The piece was concise and dramatic and one of the funniest poems I'd heard in a long time, and my entire class was rolling in the aisles.

This is an exaggerated example of form equals freedom--the poem version of flipping a teacher the bird while earning a solid A--and sticking it to the man is something most everyone longs to do . . . even when we find ourselves playing the role of the man. It's one of the many hard things about running a classroom.

Anyway, I've now got a few days off from wrestling with that conundrum. Today I'll catch up on housework, catch up on desk work, try to exercise myself into a better acquaintance with sleep. I may or may not go out to write tonight: I'm not feeling very coherent, but I suppose a nap could change that.