What Jane Bluestein has been up to: 2005

I know we’re at 6000 feet above sea level but we’re also in the desert! It’s been snowing for two days, coming down steadily, in small flakes. Kind of looks like powdered sugar. But the snow is wet and heavy, something we don’t usually see here in the southwest.

Parts of the city have gotten close to two feet. It is certainly the most I’ve seen in the 26 years we’ve been in New Mexico. And while the main streets seem to be open, our neighborhood is socked in, so we’re here for the duration—gratefully, with heat and electricity and plenty of food.

I find this really funny: I would normally be so happy to just have a day to not be running around, but being “stuck” at home is giving me cabin fever. I have plenty to do here, believe me. I’m nowhere near done sorting or cleaning my office (something I’ve been determined to do before I go back out on the road) and I’ve got about a dozen crafts projects to finish or repair, or and another dozen I could easily start! Yet I’m restless and unfocused and not getting anything done.

Boy, this has been so hard to write about, and is so convoluted and nasty, that I’m thinking about starting a separate page to keep folks updated. I’m not sure, from a legal standpoint, how much I can share, but I do believe that as long as the information is factually accurate, there is no reason I can’t answer this question.

The bottom line is that School Specialty, the publishers who bought the company that brought this book out (and also Being a Successful Teacher) is refusing to revert rights back to me. This in spite of the fact that they put both of these books out of print almost as soon as they acquired them, and (to the best of my knowledge) before they sold a single copy of either one. In addition, they have expressed no interest in the book or in me, and in fact had no idea who I was when I finally got them to respond to my requests for a termination agreement.

Yes, that’s right: They don’t want this book, but they don’t want anybody else to have it either.

As incomprehensible as this is, I am, at a different level, trying to figure out how I went from signing a contract in good faith with a publisher I really respected (Frank Schaffer Publishing) to dealing with the kinds of people I don’t normally attract into my life. (And isn’t it fascinating that a book entirely devoted to developing win-win relationships in a classroom would wind up in the hands of people so apparently entrenched in no-win policies and practices!)

I have a tremendous amount of support right now, although my attorney (among others) has encountered the same colossal degree of indifference and disregard with which I’ve become familiar.

Still... There’s always been this sense that this is just gonna work out and I'm not sure what the lesson in all this actually is. (I kind of feel like I’m trying to walk through this forest and have snagged my clothes on something and just can’t quite get loose.) This book has been such a big part of who I’ve been professionally for the past 20 years, and commercially, there’s a lot of product loyalty and familiarity.

But it may be that I’m being pushed to bring these ideas forward in a different package for whatever reason, and there is the possibility that I will end up doing additional revisions (AGAIN) so we can bring the latest version of these ideas out with a different title.

Much as I’d love to be done with this book, I’m really pretty open. I’m certainly being challenged to let go and trust right now, neither of which have been particularly easily for me. Fascinating, if painful, process.

In the meantime, I still have copies of the second (“discontinued”) version of the book available and promise to keep site visitors informed of progress on this book. (For updates, which include much of the information in this entry, click here.)

Dec. 6, 2006

Yeah, there’s other stuff going on, but this week I’m on a break, so check out my vacation blog!

Oct. 14, 2006

It seems like every year I come down with at least one case of airplane-itis. I’ve been pretty careful about not burning myself out so I honestly thought maybe this year I’d manage to evade all those germs. Feels mostly like a bad cold but I’m feeling pretty crappy and although I’m extremely grateful that I don’t have to get up and present for a few more days (or fly anywhere until the 17th), I also hate spending my time at home in bed!

There are those wee hours when I’m awake, but not real focused, and now, when I’m present but not real energetic, but in both cases I’m too antsy to just sit and watch TV or even read. These are the times best suited, for me, to mechanical stuff like creating site maps. I have two: One is organized in a table by topic, the other includes all the site content listed and cross-referenced alphabetically. This latter page is nearly done, but not quite. But then I’m still in bed with little else I can work on right now, so probably within the next day or so...

I just sent off the corrections and suggestions with the final page proofs for the 3rd edition of 21st Century Discipline. At some point (soon), I’m obviously going to have to create a new page to advertise the new book. Maybe once I have a few more assurances that it will indeed ship in early December. Stay tuned.

It took forever to get over my jet lag from the trip to Scotland. Aside from waking up at all hours of the night (which I kind of do anyhow, but not ready for lunch...) and never seeming to have a grasp of what day or time it really was, I felt like I’d left half my brain cells over there. I left nearly all of my presentation stuff at home when I packed for the conference I attended a couple days after I got home, called people at all the wrong times (subtracting, rather than adding hours), and lost track of stuff I’d brought back or things I’d left behind to do when I got back.

The end of the semester is starting to come more clearly into focus. Although I still have another month’s worth of speaking engagements, I’m at that place where nearly all the details of upcoming events are taken care of, so I’m just waiting for the dates and exciting opportunities each presents, and then boom! It’s holiday time again—and, for me, some time off to relax!

Sept. 25, 2006

Once again, I’m typing at 35,000 feet, this time on the flight out of Edinburgh after eight days touring Scotland. A fantastic trip and a wonderful break which included a visit to a number of castles (Edinburgh, Cawdor, Urquhart, and Eilean Donan at left), a little cruise on Loch Ness and even a brief stop at a Faerie Glen on the Isle of Skye!

My traveling companion, Laura Gutman, and I also stopped by a shop on Skye called “Sniomhadair,” which evidently in Gaelic means “Handspinner Having Fun.” Well we certainly had fun! Ever the yarn sluts, we picked up enough yarn (merino, cashmere, silk) to effectively pad our souvenirs but hopefully not end up looking like wool smugglers at customs.

We spent 3 days in Edinburgh (which I had visited last year for all of about 28 hours), 2 days around St. Andrews (where Laura went to graduate school) and 3 days in Inverness (right). Such beauty, and the people were absolutely lovely. I added some great photos of kids to the slide show I present at the beginning of my seminars and presentations. These are always very special souvenirs for me.

Over the past few months, I’ve come up with this goal of visiting 100 countries before I die. According to the list of countries on the Travelers Century Club Web site, I’ve been to 38. This tends to make me view travel opportunities in terms of new places to visit (and check off the list!), but I would come back to Scotland in a second.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time and finally found a willing translator in Maria Petrakis who translated 12 of my parent handouts and articles (the same ones I have in Spanish) into French. I’ve been creating the necessary pages though formatting what I copy and paste from her documents is taking longer than I’d like. This is a priority for me and I will put a link on my home page as soon as the pages are finished—and launched. Probably within a couple of days.

As I’m working on these new pages, it’s become very clear that as this site has grown, I really need a data base to manage all the stuff I’ve got here. For months, I’ve been mulling over the structure I’ll need so once I get the French pages up, that will clearly be the next thing to tackle.

Waiting for me on my desk is a 300-page proof of the pages of the next edition of 21st Century Discipline. (If you click on this link, you’ll see that it still goes to the 2nd edition, which will be available until the new book comes out in December.) I’m giving myself a day or two to de-jetlag myself and then have to take off again—this time, just to Phoenix for a conference in Tempe—so I’ll be working on the final pages on the road.

I’ll also create a Web page for the new book a little closer to its release date—certainly within the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, we still have about 4 hours left on this flight, a short layover in Atlanta and then home sweet home!!

July 25, 2006

I’m on a flight out of Atlanta, returning home from a lovely first-day-of-school (for me) in Joliet, IL. Weird routing and a VERY long flying day but I’ve booked with Delta to maintain my Platinum status for another year and to increase the odds of getting upgraded to first class, which rarely happens on other carriers.

I’ve been up since forever and am totally exhausted—I never have slept well right before my first day at school, and this goes back to kindergarten. (You’d think after 50 years of back to school experience that the excitement would have worn off. Not yet, not here at least.)

I have had a wonderful month at home. Trying to get my health together—these past few years on the road really caught up with me and I had a number of concerns to address. I’m feeling quite a bit better than I did earlier this month, but I’m nowhere near 100% yet. Still, just being home was indescribably lovely and as excited as I was about kicking off another year, I found it really hard to get myself psyched about the usual airport-rental car-hotel shuffle and the 16- to 18-hour days they often entail (certainly true this trip).

Since my last entry, I got the edited manuscript back from Corwin. This is always a nerve-wracking experience, even when I’m working with editors who know me, and who have worked with my writing in the past. This latest edition involves a new publisher and all new editors (acquisition, production and copy editors) and although I had a VERY good feeling about the company from the start, I was hoping that these new people would somehow manage to “get” me, and clean up whatever needed to be cleaned up without leveling my voice or changing the content or what I was intending to say.

I have to share how incredibly impressed I was with the work they did on this manuscript. Although I haven’t seen the final layout, I think that my production editor has a clear vision for how the text and graphics are going to appear. And my copy editor was remarkable. She found dozens of typos (and this after I re-read and corrected this thing about a zillion times) and tightened text and grammar (this editor uses different conventions than the ones I got used to using with HCI!) and ended up boosting my understanding of the idiosyncracies of this amazing language tremendously.

In looking over my earlier writing, it’s really clear to me that whatever improvements I’ve made—and I believe them to be substantial (blog entries notwithstanding) as some of my first efforts were really BAD!—are at least in part a function of good editing I’ve encountered over the years. I’m always grateful for feedback that helps me focus and sharpen any skills that will serve this craft, as it were. I may never really sort out the difference between that and which, and I’m frankly appalled at some of the mistakes I made but I swear I’m smarter than I was a month ago, and that’s always a good thing.

The third (new) edition will not be out until December of this year. In the meantime, I’m still getting a LOT of orders for the current, 2nd-edition book. If you’ve been visiting my blogs over the years, you may remember that a couple of years ago, I bought all remaining copies of this book from its last publisher and have just about exhausted the supply. So while this book has officially been out of print for a couple of years, I have been able to make it available to anyone who found their way to me or this Web site, and it has been my intention of keeping it available for anyone who wants copies until the new version is released.

This is a book that is often ordered by schools and districts from 30 to 600 at a time! We’re down to our last 10 copies or so and have orders for over 1000 books on back order at the moment! So I’ve spent much of the summer (and my “free” time at home) laying out a copy that will resemble, as closely as possible, the existing book. (There are University courses and schools that use a study guide that refers to specific pages or activities and I tried to create a volume that allow these guides to still be relevant.)

The project really challenged my skills with my page layout program, Adobe InDesign, which I’ve been using it for years but tend to have some kludgy ways of doing certain things. I clearly need to spend a week or so going through my manuals and CDs to really nail some of the processes I use most. For better or worse, I seem to know just enough to sort-of pull off these projects and there is always a project on deck so I never seem to have time to really refine my layout skills.) Nonetheless, I got the layout in to the printer earlier this week and should be getting the proofs to review tomorrow.

June 26 , 2006

I just got a copy of what will be the new cover for the 3rd edition of 21st Century Discipline. I really like it. For the last 20 years, the various other editions (which have been available through at least 8 or 9 different publishers) have all featured stars against a blue-black sky. I never quite got the connection, but had gotten so used to that image in relation to this book that it was impossible for me to think of it in any other terms.

I think this new cover is warm and appealing. I like the colors and the layout, and the fact that it manages to avoid the teacher-cutesy images that plague so many resources for educators. It’s warm and professional and since this edition is so significantly different from the last one, I think it calls for a totally new look. I’d love to know what you think so click here to send an email.

For years, I’ve been referring to the movie The Miracle Worker, a 1962, black-and-white movie that had an enormous impact on me when I first saw it as a pre-teen. It had been years since I’d seen it so I rented it again and just watched it this afternoon. I’m pleased to report that it still holds up beautifully as an inspiring and heart-warming film about teaching—and those breakthrough moments we all live for. I heartily recommend tracking down a copy, especially for anyone who’s really kind of burned out or who wants some perspective on how difficult and oppositional a student can be! And what persistence, faith and love can ultimately accomplish.

Boy, between travel and finishing the revision, I haven’t made as much progress as I had hoped. However, I did put some time, money and energy into marketing the High School’s Not Forever book. I just got back from the American Library Association convention, the first big convention in New Orleans since “the storm,” and the first time I’d been there in years. No, I didn’t see much of the violence or destruction we’ve all been hearing about. Tourists are pretty well insulated from all that unless they go looking for it, or so I’m told. I felt OK being there. The convention center was in great shape and even staying right on Bourbon Street (getting in on a rather lively Saturday night at close to 2 in the morning thanks to weather delays) wasn’t bad.

I signed several boxes’ worth of books, met a lot of nice people and presumably will get copies of the book into a number of libraries, high schools, middle schools and kids’ hands. (Many people asked for copies for kids in their own families or neighborhoods.) Ultimately, this probably won’t have much of an impact on sales, but for whatever reason, my publisher was excited about the book’s appeal to this market and going to this convention felt like something I needed to do.

Perhaps during this three-week stay at home, I’ll see some progress on some of these other goals, including the redesign I mention below!

May 20, 2006

There are a couple of things I’ve been wanting to do with this site for a couple of years. As the site has grown, with more and more documents like articles, book excerpts and handouts, I’ve been wanting to set up a data base and pages that would just display the documents (or workshops or whatever) for the appropriate or selected audience.

I’ve also wanted to be able to sort—and search!—this site by topic or keyword. And I’ve wanted a place for people to sign up on a mailing lists so that I could let them know, for example, when a new book was being released.

I now know how to do that, sort of, or at least get things started, and in the typical spirit of “well, as long as I’m doing that...” I will probably be restructuring the way some of these pages will display.

It’s still very much in the conceptualizing stages, and, for the moment, whatever changes I make will probably appear in the current structure of the site. I’ll announce these changes here in my blog, or in the rarely-visited (and not-well-maintained) What’s New section of the site which, I just realized, I haven’t touched since a year ago today. Hmmm... Must do something about that.

I’m on a commuter jet to LA and then fly to Santa Barbara where I rent a car and drive up another hour or so to visit my friend Kathy up in Paso Robles. It’s a bit of a break before a week of trainings in Thousand Oaks and San Marcos, possibly with a site visit in between. I haven’t seen Kathy in well over a year and I’m looking forward to having some time to hang out together.

Also, after weeks of not having a working laptop on the road with me, just being able to work on this—on anything—is huge!

May 9, 2006

It’s going on 11 p.m. and I really don’t have time for this. I just sent off the final revisions on the 3rd edition of 21st Century Discipline to my editor. I have been working on this project, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else, because the alternative to getting it in by tomorrow would have meant not getting the book listed in the fall catalogue. Not good.

I’m a little fried to try to talk about this process, or even decide how happy I am with the finished product right now. (Pretty much, I think. I really worked hard to get rid of some of the stuff from earlier editions that just sounded stilted or stale, the parts that don’t jibe with the way I talk about—or think about—these issues any more.)

I leave for the Twin Cities tomorrow afternoon and I’m still not completely packed yet. I’m actually taking a couple of days off to visit my friend, Linda Sorenson, and her family and just spend time not working. I don’t actually work until Saturday morning!

Perhaps it’s fortuitous (is that still a word?) that my laptop is still in the shop. Well actually it’s on its way back to Albuquerque and should be arriving just as I’m taking off tomorrow. I’m so burned out on our local service places and how long it takes to get these diagnostics run, repairs done and stuff shipped back and forth.

Not to mention the stress of having to reinstall software and updates again (goodbye to two more days of my life). Let’s hope this hardware works. Damn.

March 16, 2006

Is it really four and a half months since my last blog entry? I guess I needed a bit of a break and frankly, there wasn’t much to write about during my two months “off” between mid-November and mid-January. I actually spent most of that time finishing a major revision to a third edition of 21st Century Discipline. I had hoped to be done before my break but ended up writing nearly the entire time I was home.

My rationale for doing this (aside from honoring a publishing contract deadline and the fact that this book really needed a significant overhaul) is that I actually enjoyed the time I spent writing AND that I wasn’t on the road or presenting to teachers during those two months.

You may remember that I’m working with a new publisher, Corwin (Sage) on this new version of 21st Century Discipline. The book is now in the midst of a process I’ve never experienced called peer review. I wrote to a bunch of my colleagues and friends, people whose opinions I value, trust and respect, and asked if they’d look over the latest edition.

To my immense surprise, the majority said yes, so there are a couple dozen copies out. I’m blown away by the devotion to detail and time these individuals, many of them at least, are devoting to this book. I believe the next step will be for me (and my editor) to look over their comments and decide what to incorporate or change. So stay tuned on that front. I have a bit of a break in the action in the next few weeks and I assume that’ll be where my time goes.

Two years ago, when Eric and I started soliciting contributions to High School’s Not Forever, a wonderful teacher and former workshop participant, John Keydash, got a bunch of his students at Martin County High School in Stuart, Florida, to send in lists of their likes and dislikes, along with a few essays and comments. These were our first contributions from kids and the material formed the foundation for this book.

When he and my colleagues at HCI (the book’s publisher) managed to set up another book signing in Jensen Beach, I changed my return ticket from a job in Tuscaloosa earlier this week, so I could spend a few days in Florida. I also figured this would be a good time to visit family in the area and agreed to stop by the school and say hi to Mr. Keydash and his students.

Well, things started to snowball and this informal visit ended up turning into a full-blown assembly with me sitting in front of about 200 high school kids, many of whom had read the book, although none of the contributors (who are all seniors now, about half at another school) were in the audience.

Now I’ve been working with teachers for the past 25 years and other than some volunteer work (wherein I rarely dealt with more than a half-dozen kids at a time, at most), my experience in presenting to kids, particularly high school students, for Pete’s sake, was woefully limited. So this was a rather intimidating prospect for me.

Nonetheless, John and I sat on the stage, with him “interviewing” me (à la Inside the Actor’s Studio) about how and why we wrote the book. We turned the questions over to the kids and got some amazingly intelligent, thoughtful and thought-provoking (respectfully challenging) inquiries.

And it worked. It was one of the most uplifting, encouraging and delightful experiences I’ve had in a long time. I so totally enjoyed the kids I met, was so impressed by the intelligence and authenticity they displayed, that I walked away remembering why I was called to this often-frustrating profession. I haven’t been that buzzed from a work experience, or that full of hope, in a long time.

I’ve done four in the past three weeks. Three were in the San Diego area, including one event that involved about 100 mentor teachers for a multi-district beginning teacher support program. It was wonderful!

There was also a signing in Jensen Beach, FL after the above assembly. A few kids showed up and some bought their own copies of High School’s Not Forever. The others came maybe for a couple extra credit points, or a chance to hang out in the mall, but a few came to ask me about the book, the writing, whether it had been turned down by a bunch of publishers before it actually got published, things like that. Nice kids, every one of them.

This signing was particularly special for me as I was aided by my 7-year-old niece, Morgan, who was in charge of asking people to select the color pen with which I would sign their books, and making sure that everybody got a bookmark! I kept her up way too late and she had to use the once-a-semester homework pass her teacher gave her (an idea I’ve been sharing in my workshops and was delighted to see in use in her second grade!), but as an understandably over-indulgent aunt, I got to call this an educational experience!!

My sixth cruise. I took my mom. We had a blast. It was my first time to any of the ports (Cabo, Puerto Vallarta and here in Mazatlan). The highlight of the trip involved me and Mom in a pool with a bunch of dolphins in PV. In the classes offered, I binged on every Photoshop class I could get into. I learned more than I’ll ever remember, but have things to connect to that I never had before. And I don’t think I’ve ever come away from a class as excited or inspired or more confident in my own abilities than I did on this cruise. Awesome. Much as I’d love to do the Mediterranean cruise this summer, I just couldn’t get my schedule or potential companions to work out this time. (I did four cruises in about 14 months so no complaints.) Wonderful experience. Check out their web site. Seriously.

Looking back at where I was at thebeginning of 2005, let’s see how much progress I actually made.

MUCH better. It has helped that I took off time over the holidays and cut back on my speaking commitments. I’ve even made a pact with a friend to take Fridays off through the end of April (other than previously scheduled classes and seminars). Working on creative projects, including this web site or products is allowed, but no clerical stuff, phone conferences or ordinary “work.” Stay tuned.

Of the the 350 titles we had in our last catalogue, we have one copy of one book remaining. I will probably give it away this week just to finally close out that chapter of my life. So for all intents and purposes, this one can be checked off!!

I’ve been wanting to get my Teacher Tapes on CD, bring out the CDs for counselors, and put a number of our products (“Pads” on the Back, TeacherSaver Memo Pads and the article, “Positively Positive,” among other things) on a CD as well. And no, I haven’t done any of them. I also am planning on bringing out a collection of my Article Reprints in a book of article reprints. I have the pages laid out but not fully formatted yet. Nor do I have a cover or back cover yet. Perhaps the time off from clerical stuff will allow me more time to work on these fun projects.

I started, messed something up in the code for the shipping and can’t untangle it. Moved to 06 goals (below).

This site has so much information on it, on one hand, a data base would really help. On the other, every time I’ve tried to lay out this site, I get really bogged down. Still a possibility, perhaps for some time when I actually would have the time to explore this.

Bring out a new version of the formerly-retired Book of Article Reprints for people who want to purchase all of my articles in one place!

Coming. I even found a few articles and contributions to books that I’ve never made available commercially that I’ve thrown in.

This is ongoing. I haven’t touched the garage but I have gone through the studio and a lot of my files. Much progress on this front.

While I have made time to do more craft work, and even explore some new media and materials, I really haven’t gotten very far with this section of the site. Again, a bit of free time would help but this will eventually happen.

Keep walking (I love shooting for 10K steps a day!) and avoid eating stupid when I’m on the road.

On and off. I’ve taken a few Tai Chi classes in the past month or two and think this might be another potential avenue for me.

I actually spent a week or two working with the material but think that my approach to adult-child relationships has evolved in a way that might make this goal unworkable. Still, I did manage to bring 21st Century Discipline up to my current context and approach (and language and examples...) so it’s not completely off the table. But I do have a lot of other stuff that deserve my time and attention more.

Revise the manuscript of 21st Century Discipline once I receive the peer review and editorial comments, to get the production of this third edition on its way.

Create a place for visitors to this site to sign up for notification of new products, for example, or a newsletter, perhaps one day.

Clear out the clutter I threw into boxes and crates a few months ago when I “cleaned” my office. This means a lot of filing, sorting, tossing, stuff I really hate doing.

Go through the mountain of books, articles and suggestions and expand the resources and ideas offered on this site.

Get the shopping cart I started to build for this site actually working. (The one on the High School’s not Forever site works just fine!)

Get new business cards printed. I’m going to face down my fear of Adobe Illustrator and just put something together. If that doesn’t work, I’ll do it in InDesign (which actually makes sense to me), but I’ve put this off way too long.

Create a search function for this site, which takes me back to a data base or at least a site map.

What Jane’s Been Up To:

Highlights of 2006

Dec. 30, 2006