Advice from the Guru

Tomorrow is a teacher planning day, and on Wednesday the third quarter will begin. It is hard to believe that half the time we will spend with these students has passed already. Of course that means that we have half a school year to go, too, and in the spirit of that half-full perspective, I've decided that my students will write in class every day from now until June.

I got The Essential Don Murray for Christmas, and nulla dies sin linea, or never a day without a line is his number one piece of advice.

Another Way to Look at Things

Some teachers I know have issues with making accommodations for students with disabilities, particularly those with attention deficits. We want them to "try harder" to be more organized, more focused, less impulsive. This year, we have a blind student on our team and it has put every discussion I've ever had about special education into a new perspective. Imagine telling Jason that we know he could see if he would just try harder.

Gateways (or Have Mercy Percy!)

Every year on this weekend we drive to Buffalo, a trip that takes us about 8 hours each way. It's a long way and a quick turn around, but we go to see a little boy with whom we don't get to spend much time otherwise, and the visit means a lot to people we care about.

In the car we pass the time by listening to audiobooks. Last year, it was Twilight, a perfectly awful recording of a not very good book, but I diligently read the other three books in the series afterward. This year, it's the Lightning Thief. Percy Jackson has been a favorite of my students for the last few years, but I personally haven't been able to make it past chapter 3. The kids I have in my class right now are downright fanatical about the series, though, and I figured I owed it to them to give it another try.

Honestly? The audio version is so-so, not too annoying except when the narrator does Annabeth's voice in that falsetto that so many male readers do. The book itself is mediocre. Kind of predictable and not especially well-written or well-paced. Still, once we're finished listening to it, I know it'll be much easier for me to read the rest of the series, and then if I still need to, I can ask the kids why they like it so much.

Step Two

The kids loved the map thing, and we spent the better part of the day swapping stories of adventure, victory, injury, and loss. Now the trick will be to turn all that great raw material into writing.

Synchronicity

For my memoir unit I've been consulting the experts; in addition to the Kirbys and Jack Gantos, I've been using Ralph Fletcher's How to Write About Your Life and Jerry Spinelli's Knots in My Yo-Yo String. What a funny coincidence that they all have something specific in common besides being good resources: it's the Map Activity.

For the past few years I've been doing my best to incorporate more visual-graphic elements into the writing I ask my students to do, so this activity seemed like a good fit. In addition, I felt like it was age-appropriate and clearly it appealed to different learning styles. The premise is that you draw a rough map of your neighborhood, yard, house, or room, and label it with significant places or events. Then you write about them.

I try to do all the assignments I give my students myself in advance if I can, but in this case, time didn't allow it, even though my lesson plan called for me to model a map, so I had to wing it. Using the white board as my scratch pad, I drew a square representing the house where I lived from the ages of 4 to 10.

What happened next was like magic... as I filled in features of my map, anecdote after anecdote spontaneously sprang to mind. I hit the highlights for the class as I sketched: the neighbor's strawberries my brother and I ate, the creek we weren't allowed to play in but did anyway (until we got caught), our clubhouse in the bushes by the house, the way our street curved downhill making it the perfect sledding slope when it snowed, Dr. Messey's house around the corner where I got my chin stitched up, the 10 puppies our dog had. I could have gone on and on, but the bell stopped me in each class.

It was an amazing exercise, and remarkably, the students found my stories pretty interesting. I just hope that they will be half as inspired as I was when they share their maps tomorrow.

Right Up Until the Alligator Ate his Dog

I've really been enjoying using Jack Gantos's writing in my class this week as a model of memoir, albeit in the fictionalized sense. His website has some great advice for kids and teachers on how to turn their personal experiences into good stories, and he has published some terrific examples, especially in his Jack Henry series. (Here he avoids pulling a James Frey by changing the last names.) I confess to laughing out loud several time while reading Heads and Tails. Gantos is a kind of a kid-friendly (but still edgy) version of David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs. The kids loved the excerpts, too, and all three copies of the book were checked out of the library the same day we read his work.

Even so (and despite the fact that I knew it was coming), the part where the alligator drags Jack's dog into the canal broke my heart. To me, it was nothing short of tragic. I don't know why it is that some people find the plight of animals equally or more compelling than that of our fellow human beings. Surely it is bound up in our complex connection to nature, a relationship that has only been muddied by our advancements in technology and civilization. Or maybe it's just that pet death is really, really, sad.

Tuesday Night Special

My last cooking job was in the flight kitchen of United Airlines at Dulles Airport. That dates me a bit, because this was back in the day when not only did they actually serve food on planes, but the airlines prepared it themselves.

Twenty years ago, our crew was a very international bunch. In addition to the German chef and his three sous chefs (German, French, and Chinese-American), the lead cook was Thai, his second was Korean, there was an Iraqi, a Jamaican, an Austrian, a Frenchman, a Filipino, two Indonesians (one Balinese and the other Javanese), a guy from El Salvador, and me. I was lucky that the guys took me under their wings, and they taught me to cook not only the dishes on the airline menu, but some of their own recipes as well. Jimmy told me his method for making green Thai curry, start by frying the curry paste until the dog sneezes, and Roger showed me how to cook sauerkraut Alsatian-style, which I am making tonight. The trick is to rinse the sauerkraut well before braising it with onions, garlic, bacon, thyme, juniper berries, white wine, and chicken stock.