Great Inches in Art

Inspired by Thomas Newkirk's The Art of Slow Reading, I worked with my 8th grade students on individual lines from Anne Frank's text.  In our writer's notebooks, we created short lists of self-selected lines of text that we liked or found interesting.

Lines of text could be a full sentence or two to anything clipped from within any piece of text written by Anne Frank.

The challenge was to treat one of Anne's line as a "golden line" of text, to borrow from Kelly Gallagher's Teaching Adolescent Writers.  In the past, we have extracted our own lines of texts where we explore what idea, concept, big picture, we were really writing about.  Now, we are asking ourselves what idea, concept, big picture, Anne was really writing about.

I asked the students to create a bumper sticker of the selected line of text written by Anne Frank.  With this, use imagery to help the reader see the line through your eyes.  Avoid imagery that is decoration or window dressing--find a way through imagery, color, text manipulation, to show the reader how you feel, interpret, think about the line.

In his book, Newkirk shares the anecdote about a colleague who, when reflecting on the practice of students focusing on one small piece of a novel asked, "What's next, great inches in art?"  I laugh--I'm really fond of that line.  However, I have found that by slowing down and opening up the conversation to hear, read, and see what my students hear, read, and see in the text we have found a rich and meaningful experience (in my mind) accessible to all.

 

My mentor text / bumper sticker (above) included a spelling error in the word "contradiction" that I completely missed!  An eagle-eyed student pointed it out to me.  Another told me to pass it off as an intentional contradiction. That gaffe aside, my piece includes drawn faces of many different emotions and lines of text behind them--I included many of Anne's emotional statements.  It was intended to be a reflection or study of her wide mood swings and tender temperament.

On the back, I included a reflection of the line and the imagery I chose--essentially I am trying to make connections for my readers.  I'm digging deep into why this line matters...to Anne...to me...to all of us.

I learned, through a mixed bag of final products, that some of my students struggled with the concept of using imagery, manipulated text, and color as a way to work with the text beyond just decoration.  Of course, this leads into all kinds of discussions about media and the influences we encounter everyday online, in the car, on television...everywhere.

In the mix of student work samples below,  I included five sample that I felt achieved at least some success visually.  You'll find a mixed bag regarding the reflections included on the back of each piece:

It only takes one bomb...

This bumper sticker caught my attention for the possibilities beyond the cranky scrawl of a boy for a couple of reasons--what he observed and the connections he made.  The starkness of his lettering on the front feels so appropriate for the plain, somber, message.  Furthermore, the student equates the term bomb as a potential metaphor for mistake.

(segment of student text) I choose this quote because it represents something more than a single bomb.  Any one movement, one noise, one accident or even as the quote suggests one bomb could spell doom for them all.  A movement or noise could alert (illegible) in the shop below, who would turn in the Franks to Nazi S.S. forces.

When will we be granted the privilege of fresh air...

 I found myself really pleased with the focus on the lush green nature of this bumper sticker.  It feels soft.  It looks pleasant.  And there, dominating it all, the word "privilege" looms and puts nature and fresh air into a fresh perspective.  To be fair, we had been discussing this concept (Anne and nature) and had looked at this quote as a class.

(segment of student text) This quote hit me because we don't normally think of trees and grass as a privilege.  We take advantage of things like this and its weird to think that it takes being trapped inside for 2 years for someone to realize this.

 

I firmly believe that nature brings solace to all troubles...

Here I found myself drawn to the image of the girl, alone in nature, complimented by the bold text of "believe" and "solace"...when I think of Anne, I return her longing for someone to hold onto and her profound conviction that happiness can be found through the sun, the trees, the air...finally, I love the clouds.  How often do younger students include fluffy white clouds into an outdoorsy image?  These are like puddles of eggplant, oil slicks...they move, in my mind, across the gloaming.

(segment of student text) This quote reminds me of every sunset I've ever seen.  I imagine the sliver of the oranges, yellow sun in the center surrounded by the reds and pinks that blend together until they fade into purples and black.  I am reminded of all the places that  have the best sunsets, like the beaches in the Outer Banks and the shores in Hawaii and the Chesapeake Bay.  As the memories come flooding back I remember the sense of comfort and warmth that sunsets have always given me. 

Himmelhoch jauchzend und zum tode betrubt. - Goethe

On top of the world or in the depths of despair.

 The image speaks to beauty and destruction, freedom and containment, fragility and severity.  Inside the bird, the student wrote "On top of the world." Hugging its feet, the words "or in the depths of despair seem to cling to barbed wire themselves.  Adding to the feel of the piece for the reader is the simple tone of the colors of graphite and paper along with the text written in German.  It  makes me feel uncomfortable and wary--yet, a sense of longing exists as my eye, after tracing the line of barbed wire back and forth, constantly comes back to the bird with its back to us...looking off to its right, off the page, unaware of us behind him.  Is it looking in, or out?  My gut tells me...out.

 (segment of student text)...Anne is torn between whether she's lucky or in a deathtrap.  The picture I drew "the bird on the barbed wire" symbolizes how the bird is free and on top of the world but if he takes the wrong step and isn't careful he could die.  In German "zum tode betrubt" translates into "in total silence."  Throughout Anne's diary she is conveying her sadness and longing to be free and happy once again.

What I could be if...

The manipulation of "if" strikes a melancholy chord.  I love the sunrise (or sunset?) behind and framing "if" and the fact that the long narrow lane fading into the horizon almost perfectly splits the dark and light diving the sky also seems appropriate.  The overall image makes me contemplate the line, for sure, but the combination of the sky and the word "if" asks me to dwell on the melancholy.

(segment of student text) Her usual hopelessness puts a great weight on five words that sometimes are used for trivial things, but in Anne's world she clung to a perfect place she would live in after being in hiding, that was, if she lived, if she would not be tortured, if she could make it past this traumatic experience mentally sound, but she didn't.

There is no smoke without fire...

Perhaps my favorite visually, the student looked surprised when I praised it.  A difficult task is to take a cliche such as "Where there is smoke there is fire" and create imagery with a relevant connection to the literature.  Although the image is only smoke and fire, there is something enormous, out of compass, and untenable about the message behind the image.  It elevates the line beyond the cliche and provides a slice of the horrific and shameful.  It makes me want to look at it.  It makes me think about the line of text as it pertains to Anne's situation...and then I read the student's reflection on the back.  And I am surprised again--the line comes from disagreements with Mrs. Van Daan over Anne's skirt length.  And I reflect again on the image and love it even more--the toothsome ranklings of a fourteen year-old girl!  I felt Anne's spirit when I read this student's reflection (below).

(segment of student text) In Anne's case, she is "immature" because her skirts are too short and she is too loud.  It shows you just easy it is to label someone personally wrong.  This quote connects to me because sometimes I feel the same way as Anne.  Some people see me as irresponsible because I like to have fun while doing something serious.  Its like someones personality affects on how other people see them, but then nothing happens without a reason, so sometimes I say if those people don't like me, then maybe its a sign that we weren't supposed to be friends.  Because if they do judge me without knowing me, that it isn't meant to be.

Without Any Comfort

Long pining for comfort, Anne Frank wrote on Christmas Eve of 1943, "Crying can bring relief, as long as you don't cry alone." I can't help but wonder how often each member of The Secret Annex wept alone.

Did they hear each other weeping gently in the dark?

Without the ability to comfort each other, did they just leave each other be to cry alone in a private space?

At one point Anne describes crying large round tear drops. They stained her dress with dark blotches--she sat alone in the water closet for privacy. Was this her private space?

She also wrote of a time, alone in the office, where the tears steamed down her cheeks. Long thin ribbons of anguish--a common experience among the thousands in hiding--shared with no one.

The image I chose for my poster (the small child comforting another) speaks powerfully to me because this simple act seems so inaccessible for Anne.

She turned to her diary, her writing, for comfort.

She turned to Peter.

She turned to her father.

She turned to Miep and the brief moments when Miep and the others brought books, food, or news.

Anne turned, and turned, and turned.

Alone.

Anne's words are important. They tell us that friendship and family nourish us. We really can not survive without the daily dose of close friends or the unconditional and unwavering love of family.

I'm also reminded of the fragile condition of being human, of being a part of a family, of being a friend. We need to play both roles...we need to embrace both roles.

Sometimes we lean on another and we cry.

Sometimes we have to be available so that another may find their comfort.

But always we must be aware and respectful of those relationships so none of us ever has to turn, and turn, and turn.

Without any comfort.

Bringing Life to a Line...Digitally

We're using an app called Phoster to create digital posters of a slice of text from the The Diary of Anne Frank.

Students dig for one image that helps us see the line if text through their eyes.

Additionally, manipulating the text (font, boldness, color, spacing) should also affect how the reader receives Anne's line of text.

In this respect it takes on some of the properties of poetry--isolating words or segments of lines on the image tells its own story.

Students then attach the image to a blog entry about their work--why should anyone care? Why should anyone see Anne's line through your eyes...what does the reader gain by having you guide him/her to the line?

Why is it important to you?

Students will blog (@8grwriters) and tweet their work throughout the following week.

Attached here is one example of a mentor text I created for class. On an upcoming blog post I will model a response to a different poster and line.

One Step Closer

Introduction: Nature's Presence
Stemming from inspirations from West Chester University's and the National Writing Project graduate course Literacy in Bloom (PWP-510-01) my 8th grade classes wrote, reflected, and dug deeper into nature.   More specifically, this digging was about change.

a) A change in the way I taught some traditional, classic literature.
b) A change in what we wrote and what tools we used.
c) A change in how we connected with the texts.

This final project demonstrates how new knowledge can be applied to current curriculum while, at the same time, incorporating emerging digital technologies...without sacrificing anything.  When we dig deeper, we provide a rich and authentic experience for our students.  We move closer to the text and as you will read here, a closer understanding of our humanity.

The Recent Past

While nature has played a role in the core literature read in class, I had done little with nature over recent years beyond theme.  In September we discussed and wrote about Stephen Crane's use of nature in The Red Badge of Courage. Our pens focused on nature's indifference to man and how it lives on, no matter what man does--as it pertains to the novel.  While men slaughter one another, birds sing on as the cannons quell.  As the clouds of black smoke, oily and choking, dissipate, natural sunlight filters through the lush green canopies of Virgina.  Indeed, nature's indifference overcomes man:

"As he gazed around him the youth felt a flash of astonishment at the blue, pure sky and the sun gleaming on the trees and fields. It was surprising that Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment. " Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

Yet we had not made any connections with nature in our own lives.  At the same time, dissonant sounds of wrankled students reverberated through the 8th grade--few found much worthy of original thought in their writing and class conversations (except "I don't like it.") in The Red Badge of Courage.  Clearly, class discussions and writing activities occurred at arm's length from the text. We covered the material, but latched onto little.

We found a similar relationship with A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Nature rebels as Oberon and Titania fight.  Contagions, fogs, floods destroy crops, slay wildlife, and threaten the very existence of humanity.  Nature and man have a one-sided relationship--man is subservient to nature and the fairy kingdom.

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, 
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents:
The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Nights Dream II.i 

So much of the play occurs in the woods.  The audience is asked to use their imaginations as they take a journey with the characters into enchanted woods that are home to imagination, mischief, and magic.  It is playful--we comprehended the story--but we never dug into our own relationships with the woods, nature, or our imaginations.

More specifically, our discussions and writing about humanity and nature, as a class, fell far short of making any personal connections.  The magical pull of nature, again at arm's length, felt more like the pall of nature--something shrouding an idea.  We didn't lift it to reexamine it as a life experience that we all shared.

My Transformation in the Woods

The work by Richard Louv and David Sobel transformed how I look at nature as a teacher and how I approach nature in literature and our own writing.  While it may be too late this year to establish those connections with The Red Badge of Courage and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Louv and Sobel enhanced and changed our classroom relationships with The Diary of Anne Frank and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer beyond anything I created on my own over the past seventeen years.

Struck most by the work of Richard Louv, I wondered what role the natural world played in the lives of my students--this became my starting point, and our way in, into the woods.  And it was through these class conversations and writing experiences that I began to identify so many missed opportunities in the past for deeper connections between my students and the texts.

Change indeed occurred.

Revisiting Nature
Borrowing an idea from David Sobel's Childhood and Nature, an early writing goal for the class as we started The Diary of Anne Frank was to use writing and digital tools to serve as an ally for something in nature.  First, however, we would reflect on our previous (childhood) relationships with nature, and continue writing about any changes in that relationship over the years.

As an aside, I knew Anne wrote quite a bit about nature and I was hoping to use this because she was cut off from it...and we are not.  Or so I thought.

The results astounded me.  I anticipated most students having a healthy relationship with nature--at the very least I anticipated many of the athletes identifying sports as their current thirteen-year-old connection with the natural world.

It breaks my heart to reveal below what many of the students shared.

After several different drafts in our writer's notebooks, I asked students to write Tweets--design a "golden line" that captures the spirit of your recent writing in 140 characters or less!  I created a unique hashtag for our students, as a way to teach them about using a hashtag to reach an audience.  Hashtags would come into play more directly in the future.

After all, if you use Twitter and have few followers, are you truly writing to an audience?  Hashtags would become our way to reach an audience...when the time was right.  But for now, it was time  to practice and a time to express our thoughts about our relationships with the natural world.

Charming messages like this one above caught my eye and attention at first.

Then, as the students took turns with the iPads and adding their messages, another idea began to emerge--students recognized that they had grown apart from nature, and have lost something in the process.

The simple prompt evoked more than I imagined: Share a line that best represents your relationship with nature.  Consider what it is now, and if it has changed (for better or worse) over the years.

The repetition of loss, being a stranger or an intruder, caught me off guard--even though I had heard Louv's message.  Yet, what troubles me most is the visceral sense for some that they may never get it back.

 

Nevertheless, the lessons and possibilities for connections to literature blossom within these lines of text.  I began to wonder could I help my students take a step back towards nature?  Could I help repair those relationships through literature and writing?  Undeniably, the two major messages here are a) that nature has been a place of magic, wonder, and inner peace, and b) that magic, that connection, has been displaced by busy lives, speed, technology, and everything we occasionally hear people mutter about young people--their lives are too planned, too packed, too busy.  And technology is only making it go faster.

The privilege is mine as I read their tweets, their blogs, their essays.  While cries of loss permeate the text, the reverence and awe of nature is still a very real seed within them.  As I read the tweets below, Anne Frank's message to Peter of inner peace and happiness resurfaced in a way I'd never grasped:

When I looked outside right into the depth of Nature and God, then I was happy, really happy.  And Peter, so long as I have that happiness here, the joy in nature, health and lot more besides, all the while one has that, one can always recapture happiness.

 

Nothing is too late, but I can't help returning to the feeling that I let some months slip away with these kids.  The love and reverence for those childhood experiences still exists.  Something is indeed left to work with!

A few days back, a student shared that she is developing a theory about honesty and writing--we are most honest when we write.  We tend to be more willing to disguise the truth or bury the truth when we think or silently consider--we convince ourselves of falsehoods, or we repress them and in so doing we no longer need worry.  Out of sight, out of mind.

Just how out of sight and mind had nature become?  The more I read the heart-breaking honesty of my students, the more I was and am left wondering...

...is this student the exception now, and not the rule?

...what is written in between the lines of this student?

...is there still magic out there for this student?

 

...will she ever return?

 

...would the warmth of this poet's voice have ever reached out? 

...a raw finality sprouts from the word "rests"--almost chilling--do these words speak the plain truth for this generation?

Digging Deeper

Charged with a renewed energy, I re-purposed Sobel's inspiration from nature writer Brenda Petersen,

'In our environmental wars, the emphasis has been on saving species, not becoming them,'

Sobel adds,

"If we aspire to developmentally appropriate science education, then the first task is to become animals, to understand them from the inside out, before asking children to study them or save them."

Having just come off a research paper and not wanting to recycle that approach to information, I distributed a wide range of essays on the natural world.  We read essays and wrote in our writer's notebooks about anything that moved them. At times they wrote from the perspective of their understanding of that creature, plant, circumstance--not a study, not research, not someone telling them what was right or wrong--but we wrote purely from the capacity for compassion.  We tried to place ourselves in the roots of the plant or the hive of the bee.

Short of running around outdoors and growling or flapping our arms like wings, we used our imaginations to insert ourselves in another place, another creature, another circumstance.

After sharing their written work from the point of view of something (animal, plant, etc.) from the natural world, I asked students to write and perfect Tweets, again in their writer's notebooks, and then showed them how to Tweet their perspective out into an interested audience by using real hashtags followed by the public:

As is the case with all of our Tweets, we used a classroom account and a set of six iPads.  Students had to mark their entry with their initials at the end of their Tweets which are only completed and sent from the iPads in my classroom.  They do not have access to this Twitter account outside of class.

While much of their initial work has the patina of activism and a persuasive essay-in-the-making, my goal of asking the students to become the voice for the voiceless started to come together:

Taking turns posting our thoughts beyond the Tweets, we then turned to our classroom blog where some blog entries just absolutely broke my heart:

And others continue to reinforce the message present by Louv--human beings need nature.  And when they do not have it, they miss it.

I like the transition to the blogs because they leave little room for interpretation or possible misreading of a Tweet.  Here, students identify that change had indeed occurred--they have grown apart from nature:

The same message resonates loud and clear with many subsequent blog entries:

And when students are not lamenting the loss of nature in their lives, they revel in the memories once shared in nature:

In the end, I can only conclude that nature and young people is a significant topic to continue to study.   People such as Richard Louv and David Sobel need to be read, heard, and shared with parents and educators.

The Nature of Anne Frank
With my own awareness heightened, I tuned into more than Anne Frank's long-lauded and highly publicized chestnut tree.  Passages I never noticed before stood out. Only six months before their discovery and capture, Anne irrevocably joins nature and happiness hand in hand:

"As long as this exists," I thought, "and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts, I cannot be unhappy."

I see parallels between Anne's desire for nature and the experiences my students remember of their childhoods:

 

 We are still reading and writing about Anne Frank, and the more we write about our own connections and slow down while reading Anne Frank's diary, appreciating her connections, the closer we grow to the text.

This student identifies power of Anne's use of the word "privilege."  Who in my community of learners could imagine that taking a breath of fresh air could be a privilege?  Can we even identify with that here in America?  I like that my student in this blog post, at the very least, acknowledges the concept of breathing as a privilege as "unreal" to her.

 

Additionally, this segment from a recent student essay resonates with Anne Frank's belief that her happiness is tied to Nature and God, and we all have access to all of it...if we would only take the time:

The Future: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

As a class, we will read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in May.  My typical use of literary connections will still be in place, but I am looking forward to slowing down to connect with the text.  

I'm thinking of using Tom's running to the woods to remain a child, to play (Robin Hood, and Pirates), to imagination to reconnect to the ideas my students have already expressed.  As writing is a recursive process, I'm interested in seeing my students use a highlighter to go back through their writer's notebook to find sentences, phrases, ideas that fit, in any way, with Tom's need to escape to childhood, to play...to breath the fresh air.

Concluding Thoughts

Studying nature as a writer has reminded that I am not powerless--on the contrary, as a teacher I wield the great privilege of power and influence over how young people think, what young people read, and what young people do with their writing.  Taking Literacy in Bloom and integrating the ideas learned in that class back into my classroom taught me the research and work of people such as Richard Louv, David Sobel is closer to the heart-wrenching truth, stark and alarming.

Today's goal is as simple as tomorrow's goal--help my students slow down, look to the outdoors again, and take one more step closer to the texts they read and the texts they write...and in so doing, one more step closer to themselves and the natural world.

I refused to close my eyes

oday's writer's notebook topic was on dreams, lullabies, nightmares, spells, or magic.  We will be beginning A Midsummer Night's Dream in the coming weeks and I wanted my classes to start writing about some of the imagery, ideas, themes, and words.  My entry written side by side with my students is below:

Dreams fascinate me as does the notion that people study dreams--and study them to interpret them which then tells us something about ourselves.  You can't predetermine what you want to dream about--sometimes you can't even recall what you dream about--and there are dreams which never leave us--the dreams I had as a child have stuck with me through well over 30-35 years--one recurring dream I had as a child always rises to the top of my dreams memories: a marching band of soldiers approaches me--I couldn't see them and never did--simply stopping their feet to the slow rhythm of several bass drums--I was in a neighborhood, and no one else was outside--the band still approached, relentlessly, tirelessly--they were close, just on the other side of the hilly road I stood in the middle of--there were no cars--no traffic, so sound except the sound of feet and drum, feet and drum--the sky was blue and cloudless--all of the houses were one story tall--each house and lawn was neat and tidy and bright--the day was bright like the sunshine in an Edward Hopping painting--and yet there was nothing friendly, nothing welcoming--it was an imposing moment which I dreamed over and over and over--it frightened me--as I layed awake many nights I refused to close my eyes--and often lost--not wanting to shut my eyes for fear of standing frozen in the middle of that neighborhood street before the advance of a dull thud of a band of soliders I couldn't see.

Edward Hopper: Sunlight on Brownstones

Why I Write

y Tweet to #whyiwrite in recognition of today being National Writing Day: I write because it is an imperfect art accessible through its forgiveness of our imperfections and humanity. 

Yesterday, I gave my students the prompt Why I Write in anticipation and recognition of today being National Writing Day.  As I've learned to do through the NWP I write alongside of my students--yesterday was no exception.  The following is what I produced in my Writer's Notebook writing alongside of them:

I write for the _______  --there are so many reasons why I write that I find it difficult to place a thumbtack on one reason.  I write now, in this moment, to show you, my students that I do write, that I write alongside of you, that my writing isn't necessarily great or creative or inspirational--I write to show you that we all can struggle with it--I write because it is an imperfect art accessible through its forgiveness of our imperfections and humanity--I write for myself outside of class because it allows me to be private in public--in the moments that I write I am alone with my thoughts and I still realize others may read it--I wrote last November to grieve over the death of my beloved dog, Rain--I wrote last December to remember and celebrate the many loving uncles and aunts and grandparents I've been blessed by--I wrote Monday afternoon with my Nature Journal club to observe the outdoors, to relax and refocus myself--it can be a kind of therapy or cleansing as much as it can be a way to play and explore and create...

Resource Book Review: Time for Meaning

Time for Meaning: Crafting Literate Lives in Middle & High School by Randy Bomer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A great strength of Randy Bomer's "Time for Meaning" is a clear focus on how the physical and social structures of a classroom affects the writing process. As an aside before I go too far into my review, he focuses on the secondary classroom but it is certainly transferable to the middle school classroom.

Bomer writes, "I want my classroom to be receptive rather than transmissive or gregarious." Backed by the research of Murrary, Calkins, Atwell et al. Bomer tells us what his goals are and how he attempts to achieve them.

Later in the book he spends a chapter relating some of challenges in establishing a writing class--resistance from both (some) students, (some) peers, and (some) administrators. It illustrates the how heavily invested our culture is in clearly measurable objectives and assignments. Where the research and our cultural preferences clash is in the fact that writing is recursive and unique to experience and development of the individual. Furthermore, what our culture recognizes as the standard measure of competent writing--the five paragraph essay is a piece of the wedge which prohibits young people from developing their writing ability.

I want to add, that the final chapters which highlight the resistance and, at times, venom of individuals is a sad circumstance in education. Usually reserved for young teachers (easier prey), the criticism Bomer received ("your program") from some colleagues was divisive and ignorant. Yet, it is worth reading--not that any of us would experience the same treatment, but it is good to hear where the other side comes from--and I'll leave my comment at that. Read and judge for yourself.

You might think by reading that previous paragraphs that Bomer is proposing something absurd. Quite the contrary, he speaks of demonstrating value in student work, keeping detailed records of what students say and do, conferring with students on a daily basis about their reading and writing, and establishing that literature can help us create an awareness and respect for many things.

His students keep a writer's notebook and use it daily. His teaching style is to ask questions based on what the students write--pushing them to go deeper, to keep asking why, to live a life founded (in part) on inquiry. And writing is a great place to practice that skill.

Bomer offers many great ideas for incorporating a writer's notebook in your class--this book is great mix of current sound research and practical methods of encouraging a depth and extension of the traditional student writing produced in many schools today.

View all my reviews

National Writing Project Day 5: Show, Don't Tell

As part of a teacher demo today by Sarah (PAWLP) we had an opportunity to work from some writing samples already in our daybook.

The first challenge was to write directions for a photographer who was going to recreate or film the experience.

I treated it like I was writing for a film and ended up using the idea of a wide angle shot of a camera, scrolling in to the opening of my narrative:

Wide angle shot of a suburban neighborhood from above.  We move in slowly as might towards one house in particular.  A white van sits in its driveway and a very tall man is walking to it from the porch.  Details of man and van are vague at best.


The morning shy over the house remains violet from the waning night.  The horizon--a thickening line of pale lavenders.


The ground is wet from a recent summer shower.


We zoom in slowly on the van from the side and to the rear, we see more of the house beyond it--two rocking chairs on a porch, colorful annuals in outs, and one light one downstairs towards the back of the house.

We swing along the side of the van and enter the passenger side window, rolled down, and enter.  We see Norman.  Tall and over-sized for the front seat, Norman stares at his cellphone in his open palm.

Phase two of our demo was to breathe some life into a character.  I chose to stay with Norman as I may be developing it for my rough draft for the week.  We had to write comparisons, showing what they do not embody.

Sarah used Sonnet 130 (Shakespeare) as a model for us: "My mistresses eyes are nothing like the sun..."

This proved difficult for me.  It forced me to look at my character in an entirely new light.  I had to see a new detail which I may have ignored or maybe just didn't see:

Norman is ten pounds of cotton in a two pound bag--his wrist and shin and chest hair burst around and over and through the fabric like plumes of insects silently stalking prey.

What worked here for me as teacher and writer was not worrying about defining showing versus telling.  We were invited to work with our own authentic pieces of writing to begin to breathe life into it.

We did other exercises and discussed the ideas behind showing versus telling, but I have to throw it out there that I appreciate learning from colleagues when we are permitted to play around with the work, experiment, heck even fail at it--but it sure beats being lectured at and simply just told x, y, and z should be done because Dr. Fancydegree wrote about it in a book.

Teachers need to put their hands on the task and need to do it themselves to be able to understand it and then be able to teach it.

I'm appreciating the spirit behind our instruction in the PAWLP workshop--write alongside of your students.  See yourself as a writer...be a writer...and bring that into your classroom.

Start teaching the writer and not the writing.

The Big Picture: Bringing mentors into your classroom...

On July 6th I will be presenting a presentation entitled The Big Picture: Bringing mentors into your classroom through videoconferencing tools such as Skype, iChat, and Google+.  The following is the supplement which I will distribute to the teachers.  This is a part of a National Writing Project summer workshop hosted by the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project at West Chester University.

 PAWLP Presentation

National Writing Project Day 3: Exploring Modes

Our core exercise in the morning began with our reading through our journal/daybook and highlighting similar topics with one color.  I ended up using three colors and found family, nature, and art to be my recurring themes.

Afterwards we were asked to take one of these ideas, not necessarily a large theme but something smaller within that theme, and turn it into a narrative piece, and informational piece, and a persuasive piece.

The experience affected my tone and my voice as I wrote.  Taking an idea (a deer approaching me) which I anticipated being best suited for narrative proved to be equally satisfying to writing and more complex to explore as both informational and persuasive essays.

What I learned is that there is still narrative within the information and persuasive essay, but each of those essay forms lended themselves to my experience being about something else.  Something bigger than simply a deer approaching me in the Berkshires back in July of 1995.

I was more tempted to look back what I had previously highlighted to search for similarities and connections.  One jumped out at me.  Highlighted in the same orange ink were brief entries about a bird's nest which I had unwittingly destroyed; a starving dog yapping at me in Seville, Spain; a peacock chasing me on the grounds of a castle in England; and an interactive map demonstrating the ongoing devastation and disappearance of bees worldwide.  Other observations in my daybook included regional/personal gardens, plants, and vegetables.

My writing explored both personal and common public experiences when human beings intersect with nature--both intentionally and unintentionally.  We are a part of nature yet we've seemed to do a pretty thorough job of almost extracting ourselves from it and with it--responsibility.

With each new neighborhood carved out of our communities we push wildlife into the crowded recesses of what is left.  Along with the loss of natural habitat, some of the insecticides we spray kills the bees.

And as is often attributed to Albert Einstein, if the bees go, so do we.

My homework is to continue to draft one of these pieces tonight--and, as our group reflected after we wrote, many of us are tempted to research and read up on the topics which have emerged from us.

Granted, we are adults, and no longer adolescents or teenagers.  Our interest and fascination with exploring a thread of thought through several modes generated from process writing may not mirror that of a 14-year-old.  However, our generational differences do not counter the fact this is just too powerful a tool dismiss.

I'm immersed within the process and I'm looking forward to bringing it to my classes in the fall.

Assignment: Writing through Imitation

On June 1st my creative writing class will participate in a Skype session with Dr. Gregory Roper. A longtime friend of another professional in my district, I was approached to contact Dr. Roper as he has recently published The Writer's Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing.

The premise lays it out that human beings learn from imitation and experience. I can think of a dancer watching and stepping as an instructor demonstrates; perhaps a tennis or golf instructor is a more appropriate analogy--we watch, someone guides us, and we take a swing.

Roper notes that if we watched any of Ken Burns's PBS documentary on the Civil War "you heard letters written in beautiful prose by men and women with no more than a grammar-school education. How did they learn to write that way? Through practice--and imitation."

He takes it further: "In school, William Shakespeare and John Milton were given assignments asking them to imitate carefully the great Latin authors Ovid, Cicero, and others. Abraham Lincoln, surely the best writer of all our presidents, learned his prose style by imitating his great masters."

So, the arrangement is that my class will attempt to imitate a great author and Dr. Roper will speak about the process afterward and offer some critique...hopefully opening up some useful discussion between my 8th grade students and Dr. Roper.

The assignment to take a given passage and rewrite it in the style and voice of a different master. Since my students have read both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Red Badge of Courage, our two authors are Mark Twain and Stephen Crane. As an aside, many of my students this year find Crane painful and literally groaned at the prospect of revisiting him.

The two passages I selected are when Tom first sees Becky Thatcher and goes through a series of histrionics to show off for her to gain her favor, and when Henry witnesses his friend, the tall soldier, walk away from the group of freshly battered men, find a place which suited him, and collapse and die.

Rewrite Twain in Crane's style...and rewrite Crane in Twain's style. As an side, the fact that the surnames rhyme has been a pain in the ass. I and my students have constantly confused each while talking about this assignment--"in the Crane passage, not where I'm writing like Twain but as Twain writing Crane...is that still the Crane passage or the Twain passage.." Fun times.

In our rough drafts I've found that my students have been able to (bit by bit) alter the tone (somewhat), modify the word choice (mostly) correctly, and have even picked up on Twain's use of simile and metaphor while trying to conjure some appropriate uses of nature for the Crane-sque Tom Sawyer rewrite.

Where we are falling short is in the syntax. The 8th graders are all over the map in their understanding of phrases, clauses, and sentence structure. This aspect of the assignment is a challenge, but a refreshing one. It afford us a practical approach to grammar--"THIS is why we study the differences between phrases and clauses and adverbs and..."

Admittedly, we cobbled this Skype class together rather quickly, but I do like what I am seeing. I'm looking forward to hearing Roper's thought on manipulating syntax appropriately and trying to find a way to make it work for my 13-year-old brains in the future.