Do you ever feel like you need more "margin" in your life?

So everything was going just swimmingly on day 3 of EDU523, until my laptop wireless internet card malfunctioned. Thankfully, Dr. Bailey let me borrow her computer for a couple hours, so I was able to try my hand at taking and editing a photo of myself.  I used the dropper tool to fix my messy hair, and edited out the coat rack behind me in the photo.  Turns out, I don’t really need my hair brush, not for online photos anyway. 

I’d like to be able to edit out the clutter that has been running rampant in my house, yard, and personal inner peace this week.  Just too many things are happening at once. But they are “all good”.  Last night I had my house filled with my family, who came to visit our niece.  Meadow is stopping over at our house for a couple of days on her way from her home in Alaska to visit her mother in Sweden.  Meadow is quite a colorful character, and her name totally fits her: refreshing, Bohemian, anachronistic hippie. She lifted her bluesy, beautiful voice and shared some of her original songs with us.

I have been thinking about the 70/20/10 ratio, particularly about the issues that I am hearing my colleagues mention about students with reading and writing weaknesses.  I wonder in what proportion we learn these  skills from the three sources:  from experience, or from interaction with others, and from formal education. Obviously, the rudiments of language we learn orally from parents.  And the basics of literacy we usually learn from primary grade teachers.  But how did most of my peers learn to speak and write really well? 

How did I?  My parents both spoke good English, with only occasional slang.  Interestingly, although my father spoke French (Canadian) before he spoke English, his grammar and vocabulary were better than Mom’s.  Mom completed nursing school, so she had the better “formal” education.  Dad earned his associate's degree in business through correspondence courses.  Mom was an avid reader of non fiction and was a champion speller.  Dad did crossword puzzles.  I think he worked his entire life on increasing his English vocabulary as well as improving himself in many other areas.

My middle school English teacher gave me a good start in diagramming sentences and increased my understanding  of the structure of sentences.  But it was my amazing honors English teacher in high school, Mrs. Margaret Josephs, who had the greatest impact in my ability to communicate with my writing. 

She helped us to take our stories and essays and hone them until they were worthy to read aloud in class. It was wonderful when she would choose one of our pieces to read aloud with her melodious voice and inflections.  She made our intense efforts seem worthwhile. 

I read a devotional blog daily, and the contents of today’s post had to do with asking questions, and the impact that questions have on the hearer.  In summary, the idea is that questions have much more power than the answers.  They leave us vulnerable and humbled, and can help us to learn.  http://www.fischtank.com/   I am seeing that Bonnie and Jane, among other colleagues in EDU523 are both wonderful questioners, and better questioning technique is something I need to use more.  A good question can brings us deeper into the mind of another.  Questions can draw us closer.  Or, on the contrary, difficult questions in a strained relationship can separate us further. 

Have you seen that questions, even those left unanswered, can cause reverberations within ourselves that echo into the future?