"And so my baby's growing up"

I'm trying to write some paper about teaching competencies in the English language arts classroom, thinking about writing as a recursive process.

A lady in line for coffee just said that some guy (whomI can only assume is her friend or coworker or something) said he was her bitch today so she can order anything on his tab. Not to get all WOST on your asses or anything, but pejorative gender terms are starting to harsh my mellow.

Maybe I'm getting sensitive for the classroom. I don't know. I just think we can all do better. We can all pick better words.

One of the competencies I'm writing on has to do with writing being a process--recursive, ongoing, developmental, integrative. And as I write about how to teach that, I'm realizing that thought and formation of schema and reality is a process that's recursive, ongoing, developmental, and integrative, so the articulation of those thoughts and lessons should be, too. But kids really want these ideas to be fixed. I mean, I know a lot of my students want to learn stuff and be done with it. They don't really know yet that everything is always changing and that that's kind of great. So...teaching writing has a lot in common with teaching about life. Hmph.

Uh, on an unrelated note, what can we do with the phrase "vocabulary of dirt?" I've had it stuck in my head, and was thinking about writing some companion poems to that book called Appalachia that I think I've made all of you examine (by Charles Wright, my hero). But I don't know if it sounds too much like "empire of dirt." The ideas I have in mind don't meld well with Trent Reznor's aesthetics, although writing some response songs to Nine Inch Nails could be a fun project for a rainy day, too.