Teaching Practices Reflection

This year as I taught writing, we did many brainstorming activities. We did idea mapping, list making, question answering, and some free writing. We did not do any of these activities, in my estimation, successfully. One aspect of Summer Institute I plan to use to inform my teaching is free written journal activities. I used journals intermittently in my class room this past school year, but never consistently enough to be effective. A week here. Two weeks there. Never with the “day-to-dayness” that Katie Wood Ray says is so important to fostering good writing. Journaling every day during sacred writing combined with Peggy’s excellent demo on the topic made me think about what an opportunity I was missing in my classroom. I don’t know why, but I looked at journaling as a means to an end. “We will journal to generate ideas for writing assignment A. When we begin drafting writing assignment A, we will suspend journaling. Who knows when we’ll pick it up again. It sure won’t be for writing assignment B. Have at it, kids.” This was not good practice. In the future, I plan to use daily journal entries as the mining ground for all other writing assignments.

Also, Summer Institute has opened my eyes to the possibilties of using Internet technology in the classroom. I talk about it extensively in my professional piece, but using this blog during the institute has been a wonderful experience. Students need to learn how to write, publish, communicate, and function on the web. This year’s first graders may very well have the option of attending college and starting a career all without leaving the comfort of their home office. I am excited at the prospect of Internet publishing in the classroom. Now when I hear the word “blog,” my eyes don’t immediately roll back into my head in contempt. I think it will be a powerful part of my classroom in the years to come.

Self Reflection

Participating in the Marshall University Writing Project Summer Institute has had a major impact on my professional life. Before Summer Institute began, I had been Lumpkinized. But my three calendar years outside of her grasp had caused a certain amount of regression of my skills.

As a writer, I’d fallen into the old trap of staring at a blank page waiting for the idea for an entire piece of writing to leap fully formed into my mind. After reading Peter Elbow’s chapter on free writing, I entered the main phase of Summer Institute with a renewed commitment to the act of putting pen to paper uncensored. Though my motivations for its selection were based almost solely on its size and shape, I am really glad I selected Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones to read during the institute. She confirmed what Elbow asserted, and I am leaving writing project a full fledged believer in the power of free writing. Each of the major pieces of writing I attempted for Writing Project began as a free write. In the past, I might have just sat down to write my demonstration piece with some vague notes about what I wanted to accomplish. This time, I took the time to write a loose free write addressing my goals, questions, and concerns. This gave me something to start with and I was able to present it to my writing group for their input before I even started working on the more formal demo format. Both my professional and personal pieces for the e-Portfolio began as free writing during sacred writing time. I was able to take the kernel of both those ideas and revise them into something different altogether. If I walk away from Summer Institute with one new tool as a writer, it is a commitment to free writing.

Summer Institute also gave me an opportunity to stretch my skills as a learner. I learned that research wasn’t something they made you do in college to take up time. I’d allowed myself to get out of the habit of serious study, and the past few weeks gave me an opportunity to reconnect myself to the research process.  Working on my demonstration made me think about how continued reading and active searching for new educational research could improve my teaching.

My largest area of growth during Summer Institute was as a colleague and professional. I am a new teacher. This past school year was my first year with a full time classroom. I am still forging my identity as a professional educator, and I think that Writing Project was the perfect experience for me at this time in my life. I loved getting the opportunity to spend time with other professionals who are dedicated to effective and meaningful teaching. My experience with Summer Institute caused me to view myself as part of a community of educators and consider my role in that fellowship.

Westward Expansion – 5 minute timed writing

This piece was written in response to an antique gun display at the Huntington Museum of Art. I began by copying the information from the display, so the first two sentences are not my words.

 

Fur was the primary impetus of the development of the gun made for trade with the Indian. The Indian required guns that were short and light. This is a short rifle. One designed to be carried long distances, portable, and useful. Compact. Almost blunt when compared to its European counterparts. It is a strange thing to see this European hunk of wood and brass festooned reverently with beads. The ancient artistry of the bead work blending with the modern stylistic efficiency of the Remington Repeater. I feel that this gun was loved. I don’t know what complicated emotions it stirred in the owner—what compromises had to be made to own something so necessary but in a way foreign and unnecessary. This artifact strikes me as something uniquely American. The blending of two opposing cultures. Didn’t someone once say the only truly American art forms were Jazz and the Western?

Response to Melanie’s Sensory Writing Activity

This was written in response to Melanie’s activity on sensory writing. We were each given a writing prompt. Mine read “Still slightly stinky from his run, Sean…” We began free writing a response to our prompt as Melanie presented us with a series of sensory inputs that we were to incorporate into our writing. They were (in order presented) a fragrant lotion, a Michael Jackson poster, flavored jelly beans, an noise from an unidentified source, the texture of a rubber toy, a toy alpaca, the smell of raisins, and a baby toy with various textures.

 

Still slightly stinky from his run, Sean slid onto the hot vinyl of the driver’s seat. Mrs. Yang (of course Sean didn’t know it was Mrs. Yang. She was just a fat woman in an idling automobile to him) was squealing on the pavement. Sean was distressed to discover in the hubub of pulling Mrs. Yang out her car and leaping into the driver’s seat he had accidentally sat on her bottle of lotion. The chemical medicine smell filled the cab of the car and wetted the seat of his trousers. Sean supposed the smell was intended to imitate some sort of flower, but it just smelled like carcinogens to him. He was momentarily distracted by a cassingle Mrs. Yang had lying on her dash—Michael Jackson. The red leather some how hypnotized him—the glare of the photographer’s lights reflecting on its shiny surface. The overtly sexual forward tilt of the King of Pop’s narrow hips. To distract himself, Sean quickly thrust Mrs. Yang’s red, tree-shaped air freshener into his mouth. The chemical cinnamon flavor immediately over powered his Thriller induced comatose state as his mouth filled with a burst of delicious agony. Finally able to focus free of the distraction of lotion smell, Michael Jackson, and the sobbing Mrs. Yang, Sean shifted from park to drive. The venerable tan auto gurgled with a slightly mechanical grinding, as if the car protested. It sounded like stones in a blender, but Sean wasn’t concerned with the life of his engine, just getting to the Interstate as quickly as possible. Sean noticed in disgust that Mrs. Yang’s steering wheel cover had partially melted in the heat giving the rubber a sweaty, slimy feel. Sean hated it when that happened. As he pulled away he noted that Mrs. Yang looked like an overturned alpaca still rolling around on the pavement all four limbs sticking out in the air like sticks or flag poles or something. Sean hoped he’d broken her collar bone. What part of get out of your car didn’t she understand? There was a musty odor in the car too. Something the lotion and the air freshener couldn’t cover up. Like the rot of someone’s cellar. The smell of once growing vegetable matter returning to Earth. Sean was deciding retroactively that he did not like Mrs. Yang and that he was glad he’d chosen her car to hijack. He reached out and let his finger caress the soft sides of Mrs. Yang’s fuzzy dice. They felt rough, but soft. Like rain softened corrugated cardboard or corduroy at Goodwill—they felt like Victory.

Sacred Writing – June 26, 2007

Take yourself back to your happiest moment.

 

My hot water heater broke on a Wednesday. I called my landlord on Thursday morning. On Friday afternoon I was a little miffed that nothing had been done. I left the house for dinner and when I came back I was pleased to find a small man in work boots futzing about with the water main. I spoke to him briefly and since my water heater is in a little storage area outside of my apartment, I left him to his work. About an hour went by and I was getting ready to leave for the evening. I decided to see if he needed anything before I left. I peeked into the storage room and he had his back to me. He was throwing a grade-A fit—stomping his feet and jumping up and down like Rumplestillskin. I decided to give him a minute. I returned about 20 minutes later and still with his back to me he was holding a short length of copper pipe. He pointed his finger sternly at this inanimate 8 inches of metal and scolded with a tone usually reserved for vengeful condemnation “God damn you, God damn you, God damn you.” This is the happiest moment of my life.

Sacred Writing – April 20, 2007

In response to Cynthia Rylant’s When I was Young in the Mountains.

When I was young in the mountains, I didn’t really live in the mountains. I lived in the flat, fertile plateau carved out of the mountains by glaciers or pre-historic seas or by God-only-knows what massive, ancient forces mellowed the rolling Appalachians and set the Ohio River to flowing. I didn’t live in Cynthia Rylant’s mountains. I lived in the post-baby boomer suburban Appalachian sprawl that was just beginning to devour our quaint townscapes. I grew up in the age of Nintendo and Fox Television, both seeming far removed from late night trips to outhouses or regular consumption of fistfuls of delicious butter. But when I checked When I was Young in the Mountains from the Milton Library I stared for what seemed like days at those children dressed in their ancient shoes with a dead black snake draped over their shoulders—entranced by that image of the slain snake confident in the knowledge that I could jet out my front door to the vacant lots across the street and scare up one of my own.

Why Didn’t I Think of That? – Professional Writing

Mine was the first generation raised on the Internet—logging on in our parents’ basement at 2800 baud when 14.4 kbps was an impossible dream. Almost a decade before the word “blogosphere” was ever batted around the evening news, my friends were keeping journals on personal web pages when command of HTML was mandatory for web publishing. They usually involved moaning about some girl you couldn’t get to date you or launching bitter personal attacks against your high school enemies. Sometime while I was in college, social networking cites erupted like a volcano of introspection. Everyone had a blog for publishing their reactions to whatever social slights they felt they suffered. Hate-fueled flame wars erupted on comments pages—ending friendships and ruining relationships. Lured by the siren song of peer attention, I infrequently maintained a blog where I would publish newspaper cartoons PhotoShopped to include frightfully offensive messages. This was the extent to which I ever intended to use blogs: making Mary Worth talk like gangsta rapper Easy-E.Then I joined Marshall University Writing Project: Summer Institute.

The moment Will Richardson’s book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Tools for Classrooms hit my desk, I felt like a complete idiot. Of course web logs could be used in the classroom! They were a means of taking a piece of writing and making it available to a wide audience that had the ability to provide instantaneous feedback—all managed, maintained, and hosted for free on the glorious World Wide Web. I hadn’t even read the first word of the book and I felt like someone had cracked my brain open and surgically altered the way I thought about using technology in the classroom.

This year, the majority of the pieces of writing done in my classroom were done with pencil and paper. If there was time, we typed our final drafts. When we read Warlick’s statement in his article “Raw Materials for the Mind” about how a teacher from one hundred years ago could step into the classroom of today and find that not much had changed, I was ashamed. I know for a fact that my students spend a great deal of time reading and writing on the web. The ones without MySpace pages are few and far between. But I was not exploiting their natural proclivity to make them think about their writing. Worse still, those that didn’t have access to this technology at home were not receiving adequate exposure in my classroom. Sure, they were learning to use office tools to create polished documents, but they weren’t learning how to interact with the world in the context of the Internet.

Richardson asserts (and I believe him) that publishing on the Internet is extremely attractive to reluctant writers. The thought that strangers can see your writing gives it more meaning than if it is just a piece that is going to only be read by Mr. Nolte. The thought that your writing is out there for the whole world to see can be a powerful motivational tool.

Perhaps the feature of blogs that I am most excited about utilizing is the ability for students to comment on each other’s writing. When I tried peer response groups this year, most of the responses students wrote were of the “It’s great—don’t change a thing” variety. I think the interactive, conversation style format of the comments page on most blogging websites will encourage students to share in a more meaningful manner. I think students will read each other’s papers more thoroughly and give comments that are more insightful. Rather than looking at the peer review process as a series of questions on a worksheet to be checked off as quickly as possible, they will think of it as a means to praise, question, and interact with their peers. Responding will become less of a chore and more of an opportunity for genuine and authentic conversation about writing.

I believe that using blogs in my classroom will make students think about their writing in ways they currently are not. Publishing on the web gives them a clear idea about audience in a way that simply turning papers in to the teacher cannot. When final drafts are only given to the instructor for grading, it is easy for students to think of their writing as something that is done once to meet a requirement. On the web, their writing can be a living, breathing project to be talked about, changed, and improved through communication with other writers.

Sacred Writing – July 2, 2007

Write an ode to something ordinary in your life.

 

“An Ode to Aldi”

You wait for me

Patient

Red brick, unadorned

A quarter yields a buggy

A dime affords a bag

33 cents gets you one serving of lunch meat

A buck and a nickel a whole bag of chips

Your Crunch has no Cap’n, but it tastes just as good

Ketchup is ketchup where I come from

I can get a month’s worth of groceries for 60 bucks

Sure you only run one cashier per shift

But you pass the savings on to me

Fresh vegetable selection is poor, but hell—I never get those anyway

I like your Sweet Valley Cola

And Mama Cozi makes Chef Boyardee look like a chump

Response to Joseph’s Demo, “Using Reading and Writing Strategies with Film”

            When I was in high school Social Studies, we watched Roots for 15 minutes a day at the end of each class period for pretty much the entirety of the year. We discussed it casually, but mostly we were just watching. Which wasn’t necessarily bad—Roots is fairly entertaining and informative—but we never really interacted with it in a meaningful way.

            In my 12th grade English class we watched Star Wars from start to finish and wrote a paper reacting to it as an example of the “hero’s journey.” (I also refer to this day as the greatest day of my life.) I think I got a C on the paper because I got caught up in just describing the nuances of the plot and forgot to mention examples of the heroic cycle. It’s not my fault. I knew who Panda Baba was and I wanted to show that knowledge off.

            What I think is so great about Joseph’s demo is that it gives you the structure to interact with films as their own specific texts with their own specific techniques and traditions. You can get beyond just reacting to plot and talk about the structure of a film as a document crafted in a specific way to have a specific effect through the use of the camera, acting, writing, and editing. The possibilities for the use of this in the classroom excite me. I think it’s a very critical means of thinking and can really bring film alive in the classroom. Film viewing does not have to be a passive activity

            In literature courses especially, one of the goals is to increase students’ use of critical thinking and get them to write about different texts in meaningful, interpretive ways. In many cases this is difficult because reading an entire novel, or even a short story, can seem like such a chore to some students. Heck, even I think it’s a chore sometimes and I love reading a degree most 8th graders would find insane. But film can be so much more digestible, especially to the student who finds reading difficult.

            There are so many perspectives to talk about with film. You can react to the story in a psychological manner, examining the motivations of the characters and what they say about the story or the larger context of human behavior. Or you can react to the film as a piece of work, examining the technical aspects of how it was filmed and edited. I thought Joseph’s activity examining point-of-view in the film Paper Clips was a good example of this idea. I never really thought a documentary could be presented in different points-of-view until I began making different tally marks every time a new point-of-view was presented in the film. Instead of just watching the film and getting caught up in the drama of this school’s attempt to collect one paper clip for every man, woman, and child killed in the Holocaust, I was watching with a critical eye and examining how the film was managing to create its effect.

            Sure, you want students to read, experience, examine, interact with, and develop an appreciation for Melville’s Moby-Dick, but I think it would be exciting if you could make them do the same things with Spielberg’s JAWS.

Personal Writing – Third Draft

This is the prose draft of the incident. It was presented to my writing group in a slightly different form and I made some changes based on their suggestions. The changes were largely in grammar–fixing some confusing run-ons and misplaced modifiers that made the story difficult to understand in places. One major change I made based on their suggestions was the inclusion of my reason for purchasing a wheelchair. My original opening sentence just read “I’d been on the look out for a good deal on a used wheelchair for some time.” I liked the ambiguity of why I wanted to purchase a wheelchair, and since one of my main goals with this piece was brevity I didn’t want to include too much extraneous background information about what I intended to do with a wheelchair. However, my writing group found this ambiguity distracting. We decided that the issue could be addressed with one sentence and both keep the piece brief and not confuse the reader.

Big Red’s

            I wanted a cheap camera dolly, so I’d been on the look out for a good deal on a used wheelchair for some time. Cruising past Big Red’s Trading Post in Kenova, I noticed one sitting by the side of the road obviously displayed to attract the casual shopper.
            Big Red’s was a semi-permanent yard sale on a prime piece of real estate located across the street from a disused amusement park. The lot was occupied by a house trailer, a shed, and a cornucopia of found items clearly gleaned from estate sales or desperate consignments. They had a stack of VHS tapes warping in the sun, a variety of garden equipment, piles of baby clothes, some stoves and kitchen appliances clearly out of service since the early 70’s, and three wheelchairs.
            I cruised the wares, careful to not show too much interest and overplay my hand. Finally, with calculated casualness, I inquired about the wheelchairs.
            Neither of the men on the lot could help me. To get a quote, Big Red had to be roused from her trailer.
            She strode into the hot June sun with an ice water in hand. She looked all of one hundred pounds and every day of her seventy years. She didn’t seem happy to see me, and I think wheelchair prices ran steep because of it. Forty-five dollars for the show room model by the road. Thirty-five for the model near the shed with a missing arm. She didn’t have a price ready for the one out back—the real honey.
            This is the one I’d had my eye one since my first walk around the grounds. It had rusted axles, a torn seat, and the beginnings of a mud dauber’s nest on the back of it. It’s position in the back, away from the prying eyes of the public with the other destroyed and worthless items, reeked of abandonment. To put a handicapped person in this chair would be inhumane. It seemed like a surefire steal to me.
            I walked Big Red around to the back of the shed and asked her how much she wanted for this junked item. She didn’t seem sure at first, but finally settled on five dollars. I said I wanted to check it out first since I had little interest in a wheelchair that wouldn’t adequately wheel. I sat in it for a few minutes and rolled around. Finally, I figured it was worth the risk.
            I wheeled my prize back around front and fetched my last twenty out of my wallet.
            “Five dollars it is,” I said to Big Red.
            “Oh, I couldn’t let it go for that much,” she back pedaled in a tone tantamount to “I wonder how much I can squeeze out of this kid.”
            I counter offered ten. She reluctantly agreed. I took a tone. She took offense. Her son asked me if I was from New Jersey. I said no. I just didn’t like it when the price of items changed in accordance with how badly I wanted them.
            Negotiations took a sour turn from there.
            What followed is not my proudest moment—yelling at a septuagenarian on her own property about a five dollar difference in price on a piece of used medical equipment.
            She told me to take a walk.
            I demanded my money back.
            Eventually cooler heads prevailed.
            I accepted nine dollars and seventy-five cents as change for my twenty, demurely declining when Big Red started counting out pennies.
            I wedged my wheelchair into the trunk with no assistance.