Hi! I’m Ruth Ann, Todd’s wife; Cassie, Tylesha, Martin, and Wendell’s mom; Jeremy’s mother-in-law; and Zeke, Zadok, Lana, Uriah, Summer, and Isilee’s grandma. My friends have encouraged me for years to begin blogging. I write memoirs about my family and post them occasionally, and they love the nostalgia. I’m a sucker for lessons learned at the feet of older and wiser family members, and it seems many of my friends had the same affinity for good old fashioned common decency and family history. As the seventh of eight children born into a large extended family, I had much to learn from over twenty aunts and uncles, thirty first cousins from my mother’s small family and my father’s nine siblings with all their broods, and the generation following us, who constantly teach me about life and love.
My writing style for this blog is a bit eclectic, a departure from the highly structured scholarly essays I teach my middle school grammar and composition students to produce. These postings are an even further departure from my technical writing in English grammar manuals already published: English Guide to Grammar, Composition, and Logic, Grammar the Write Way: Precepts, Core, and Application. I’ve added even more exciting tomes: Making Connections: Reading and Writing Across the Middle School Curriculum, and Grammar Foundations for Writing. I know, they sound like kicking reads, right? [Writing students are NOT allowed to critique.]
By contrast, you’ll probably feel a bit like you’re sitting on my front porch with me, enjoying a cup of coffee and a fresh morning breeze. My family history played out on expansive farm porches, and I learned some of my most precious life’s lessons about faith and family sitting on those peeling white porch swings. I hope you’ll join me and enjoy the view from My Front Porch.
Basic Resume:
Owner/President, Over the Bar Instruction INC
Online English Instructor, The Potter’s School
CELEA Board Member at Large
Curriculum Developer and Author
