The Wheels on the Bus or The week I abandoned my car

Yes, it’s true; I’m parking my car and going without for a week. My plan is to use my feet, bike and UTA (Salt Lake’s public transportation) to get around. I realize that for many this is nothing earth shattering, truly it’s something people do everyday. So why then am I doing it and further more why am I writing about it you may ask. Well, before I give you the answer allow me a moment of clarification.

When I mentioned this plan to a friend of mine a few days ago she enthusiastically praised my “greenness”. Let me squelch that assumption from the start. My lists of reasons for going without a car is long but I’m sorry to say that doing it to “go green” is pretty much on the bottom. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a wonderful result of this experiment but I feel I need to admit that it’s not my primary goal. And while I’m being honest the idea of blogging about my attempts to save the planet one bus trip at a time just seems cliché and … well… a little hokey. So with that confession off my chest here’s some insight into the real reasons.

The first is rather practical in nature. While I don’t consider myself to be of the Southerner variety, spending a majority of my youth in South Georgia did result in a few dispositions in that direction. One of which is my ardent love and yet intense dislike of snow. I found my first snowfall last year in Utah to be one of the most beautiful things I’d encountered… and then I had to drive home in it. Luckily I lived mere blocks from school so if the snow on the roads was to intimidating I could just walk to work. However, in the last few months I have moved downtown (which I adore!) but am now facing a 12 mile commute in potential blizzards! Not my idea of a good time. So here’s my thinking- on those fateful mornings when I wake up to a car covered in snow I can just hop on a bus and let someone else navigate the slick roads. And I figure what better way to be ready for the first snowfall then to practice for a week. Brilliant, no?!

The next reason is perhaps a bit less practical and actually has nothing to do with transportation. I’ve recently been struck by the importance of teaching my students to be not only good readers but good writers as well. As any teacher has no doubt heard over and over again “read to write and write to read”, the two go hand in hand! And while I feel that my ability to teach, model, and scaffold effective reading has greatly improved over my first year of teaching, my writing lessons are less then amazing. Therefore I have made it my goal to become a better writer. One can’t teach what you don’t know, right? So this experiment is really a springboard, a topic of interest, to get the pen to paper (er… fingers to keyboard?) in hopes of discovering more about my own writing process and take that back to the classroom to help my students.

The last reason is a simple one. I teach at a year round school and am currently on one of my three week breaks and…well… I’m kind of bored!

So here goes! Osgood (yes that’s my cars name, don’t mock him) has been parked along the curb for his week of rest. The bike tiers are pumped up, I’ve got my UTA TRAX and bus schedules printed and a new book to read in hand. Just missing one thing so, all together now, “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round…..”