As I write this, it is mid-July and I've had four weeks of leisurely days with no classes, no meetings, no deadlines. I've already seen 10 movies (the best being The Truce), attended 5 plays (the best being La Jolla Playhouse's production of Athol Fugard's The Captain's Tiger), explored 4 major museum exhibits (the best being a day at the new Getty Museum in Los Angeles), read 8 books (the longest being Don DeLillo's 827page Underworld, but the best being Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels) and every page of our local daily newspaper (which usually I only glimpse, and sometimes not even that, for weeks at a time). I am nearly overdosed on sleep. I am so rested that I start feeling nothing is "too-difficult-to-do," at least in my normal sphere of high school classroom teacher and in-coming CATE President.  But...then...intimations of reality....I see in the news:   The State legislature still doesn't have a budget and monies may be frozen.   The STAR 9 results are about to be fully released, including LEP, and the attack on failures will surely intensify. Somewhere there are committees meeting, both State and local, to decide specifics of curriculum, empower selected individuals to lead and enforce decisions, and divvy out limited funds for implementation.

Everywhere there are groups vociferously criticizing everything about schools. And in my personal life, several actions that are supposed to be "easy" take on a Sorcerer's Apprentice life of their own, becoming endless loops of reverifying. Time compresses. Suddenly the five weeks remaining before school (with 5 a.m. alarm, five classes a day, five days a week) doesn't seem so long.

Time has always existed in two unrelated continuums for me; the "my" time, limited to short bursts of vacations, and the "dedicated-to-the-cause" time, all the rest of the year, in which other's needs prevail, and much of what others experience as the "real" world vanishes into student papers, class preparation, and school pressures. Integrating the two continuums, and being sure the "my" time keeps me "alive", hopefully at vibrant levels, has always been a difficult but preeminent personal goal, for I know that if the personal me is not healthy and growing, I might as well be the automaton that only phones in and bores everyone with predigested, don't-bother-me-I'm-busy facts and time worn clich's.

The challenge is to keep the vacation mode going all year; CATE, the organization, has been my primary tool for that continuing renewal. It gives me actual bursts of vacation-mode time, from attending short conferences like September's Asilomar or May's Lake Arrowhead retreats. It gives me ideas, from reading the creative professionals like those represented in California English and from sharing during all the sessions at the annual February convention. And it gives me both motivation and hope that dedicated individuals can make a difference professionally and yet remain well-rounded humans simultaneously. Just ask editor Carol Jago a question about literature, or classroom practice, or legislative implications, and prepare to be shown, literally, what can be. Coming together with her and the others on the CATE Board four times a year provides another jolt of energy to higher personhood via professional networking. In other words, CATE, for me, is a lifeline, a life expander, a link between.

The question for you, then, is how can we expand not only our personal time, but, perhaps even more importantly, the size and involvement of the full CATE membership? The old metaphor of the chain is pertinent; we're only as strong as our weakest link, and right now only about 3000 of us are in the chain at all. My major goal as President is to add lots of links to the chain, and to do that we need to have concerted outreach by each one of us already a member, so that the masses of those who aren't already directly experiencing the life enlargement will discover their own personal need to join. What would it take for you to recruit one new member? What further goals do you think we should be addressing?

Please share your thoughts, via the free-to-you phone (1-800-303-CATE), for voicemail or FAX, or email. I look forward to working with you the next two years.