My favorite part of the day today was when we gathered the twelve finalists who would be performing their poetry for 200 sixth graders and other invited guests, not to mention the judges. Several of them had written new material on their own, and our resident slam poet had brought three young poets to perform with the students, but also to coach them. The energy in the room was exactly what I wish for every day I come to school: the kids sat in groups with their writing out; they showed each other; they asked for advice from the visiting poets; they even took the "stage" in the front of the room and rehearsed their pieces. They listened intently to all the feedback they got, scribbling notes in the margins, changing words, adding phrases and stage directions to themselves. In short, they were a hundred percent engaged in the writing process. It was mostly because they wanted to do their best for the assembly, but those are the kind of high stakes that I can get behind.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Mountains to Scale
Oh so many projects and activities collide at this time of the year...
ONE: I'm trying to put the finishing touches on our school's journal of literature and art of which I am the editor. It is past deadline.
TWO: My room might be half-unpacked; it is serviceable.
THREE: Our last state standards assessment this morning; who thought the day after Memorial Day was a good idea for that?
FOUR: The culminating Slam performance-- there are cold feet among the finalists. Will the the microphone be in place?
FIVE: Our in-house writing sample, this is designed to show me the growth in my students' writing; it is informal, but still...
SIX: Field trips: Water Testing! Band Trip to amusement park! Dolphin Watching!
SEVEN: Finalizing my own vacation plans, all that calendar matching, emails, phone calls, and schedules of five nuclear families are finally coalescing into what promises to be an AWESOME summer. (Fingers crossed)
EIGHT: My poor garden. It suffers from neglect. I must fit it into my daily routine. I am best on an every day basis.
That's a steep list... See you at the top!
ONE: I'm trying to put the finishing touches on our school's journal of literature and art of which I am the editor. It is past deadline.
TWO: My room might be half-unpacked; it is serviceable.
THREE: Our last state standards assessment this morning; who thought the day after Memorial Day was a good idea for that?
FOUR: The culminating Slam performance-- there are cold feet among the finalists. Will the the microphone be in place?
FIVE: Our in-house writing sample, this is designed to show me the growth in my students' writing; it is informal, but still...
SIX: Field trips: Water Testing! Band Trip to amusement park! Dolphin Watching!
SEVEN: Finalizing my own vacation plans, all that calendar matching, emails, phone calls, and schedules of five nuclear families are finally coalescing into what promises to be an AWESOME summer. (Fingers crossed)
EIGHT: My poor garden. It suffers from neglect. I must fit it into my daily routine. I am best on an every day basis.
That's a steep list... See you at the top!
Monday, May 31, 2010
So Don't
The phrase "necessary evil" really bugs me. Um... who thinks any evil is necessary? Such a notion offends both my ethics and my semantics.
In some ways that expression seems like just another one of those platitudes that fall into the category of Everyone has to do things they don't want to sometimes. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if everyone stopped doing the things they really didn't want to do. I'm not being frivolous; I want to know what those things are, especially considering that almost any task can be no worse than innocuous if you know and appreciate the value of it.
So why don't we stop glorifying (as some sort of life lesson) the need to do unpleasant things, and rather let's re-frame the conversation to re-evaluate our priorities and objectives to figure out exactly what it is we "have" to do that we don't "want" to, and why we're doing that stuff anyway.
And then, for a good measure, let's stop listening to people who wave away truly troublesome issues with insipid cliches like "necessary evil".
In some ways that expression seems like just another one of those platitudes that fall into the category of Everyone has to do things they don't want to sometimes. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if everyone stopped doing the things they really didn't want to do. I'm not being frivolous; I want to know what those things are, especially considering that almost any task can be no worse than innocuous if you know and appreciate the value of it.
So why don't we stop glorifying (as some sort of life lesson) the need to do unpleasant things, and rather let's re-frame the conversation to re-evaluate our priorities and objectives to figure out exactly what it is we "have" to do that we don't "want" to, and why we're doing that stuff anyway.
And then, for a good measure, let's stop listening to people who wave away truly troublesome issues with insipid cliches like "necessary evil".
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Once We Were Hunters
My brother caught the first firefly of the year tonight. For some reason, he brought it in the house, imprisoning it gently in a loose fist, as you must. It wasn't long before the wily insect snuck out the gap formed by his curled thumb and pointer and fluttered around a bit, entertaining us between dinner and dessert. Oh, we set it free before the strawberry shortcake was served, but what memories it stirred.
When I was a kid we used to spend most of our summer evenings from dusk until dark chasing fireflies. My mom punched holes in the top of a Skippy jar, and my brother and sister and I worked to capture as many lightning bugs as we could. Unlike a lot of the other kids, we never tore their lights off or smeared their luminescence on the sidewalk or wall. To us, that dull yellowish glow was nothing but an ugly shadow of the bright flash of a living insect. To make it interesting, we set nightly quotas for ourselves, upping the target to an impossible number of bugs as the days warmed and both our hunting proficiency and the population of our quarry reached their peaks.
What does 500 lightning bugs in a peanut butter jar look like?
We never found out, and although others might have kept their captives overnight in an effort to make it to that magic number in a day or two, we never did. The rule was to let all of them go at the end of the evening: a glass jar lies sideways in tall grass, lid tossed carelessly nearby; scores of fireflies crawl out into the cooling air, scale the nearest green blade to its very top, and then with wings beating in a silent blur, blink once and are gone. At least that's how I imagine it, because we were already fast asleep in bed by then.
When I was a kid we used to spend most of our summer evenings from dusk until dark chasing fireflies. My mom punched holes in the top of a Skippy jar, and my brother and sister and I worked to capture as many lightning bugs as we could. Unlike a lot of the other kids, we never tore their lights off or smeared their luminescence on the sidewalk or wall. To us, that dull yellowish glow was nothing but an ugly shadow of the bright flash of a living insect. To make it interesting, we set nightly quotas for ourselves, upping the target to an impossible number of bugs as the days warmed and both our hunting proficiency and the population of our quarry reached their peaks.
What does 500 lightning bugs in a peanut butter jar look like?
We never found out, and although others might have kept their captives overnight in an effort to make it to that magic number in a day or two, we never did. The rule was to let all of them go at the end of the evening: a glass jar lies sideways in tall grass, lid tossed carelessly nearby; scores of fireflies crawl out into the cooling air, scale the nearest green blade to its very top, and then with wings beating in a silent blur, blink once and are gone. At least that's how I imagine it, because we were already fast asleep in bed by then.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Whose Room This Is I Think I Know
We're moving back to our original classrooms this weekend, and so I've been liberated from the yellow dungeon, and although I will miss its immensity, if not the maddening drone of that invisible fan, I have other things to worry about.
As hard as it was to pack my room up five weeks ago, confronting the jumble of furniture and boxes that awaited me there this morning was more than a little disheartening. It was hard to know where to begin. Complicating things was the fact that the data and telephone drop were demolished when they enlarged the window. My desk has been in the same place for sixteen years, and now I was going to have to raise a ruckus to get the necessary hook-ups for my phone and computer to keep it there. I left school yesterday in despair over the news; it was simply too much at the end of a long day.
I can't think of a time in my entire life when "sleeping" on something made any difference. Perhaps it's my stubbornness, but things generally look pretty much the same to me the next morning. Not this morning, though. Sometime in the middle of the night it occurred to me that I have colonized the window in that room way too long. Put aside the rubbish about distraction, everyone who enters that room should have equal access to the view. It's really not my room, it belongs to all of us who work there.
With that in mind, I moved my desk to the other corner and set up the library and reading area of the room over by the window so that the kids can grab a book and throw a pillow down to read in the sunshine.
That's if all the boxes with all the books ever got unpacked. Sigh.
As hard as it was to pack my room up five weeks ago, confronting the jumble of furniture and boxes that awaited me there this morning was more than a little disheartening. It was hard to know where to begin. Complicating things was the fact that the data and telephone drop were demolished when they enlarged the window. My desk has been in the same place for sixteen years, and now I was going to have to raise a ruckus to get the necessary hook-ups for my phone and computer to keep it there. I left school yesterday in despair over the news; it was simply too much at the end of a long day.
I can't think of a time in my entire life when "sleeping" on something made any difference. Perhaps it's my stubbornness, but things generally look pretty much the same to me the next morning. Not this morning, though. Sometime in the middle of the night it occurred to me that I have colonized the window in that room way too long. Put aside the rubbish about distraction, everyone who enters that room should have equal access to the view. It's really not my room, it belongs to all of us who work there.
With that in mind, I moved my desk to the other corner and set up the library and reading area of the room over by the window so that the kids can grab a book and throw a pillow down to read in the sunshine.
That's if all the boxes with all the books ever got unpacked. Sigh.
Friday, May 28, 2010
I'm So Money
Was I flattered to be included in so many of my students' slam poems today? Given my post a couple of a weeks ago about being a character in other people's blogs, you might think so. And, if you find the urge to wrap me in duct tape, throw me in the hideous yellow cupboards, and steal my lollipops and iPhone complimentary, then you might also say yes.
Chalk it up to concrete details, but I think my name was a good luck charm: every kid who mentioned me was in the top three.
Chalk it up to concrete details, but I think my name was a good luck charm: every kid who mentioned me was in the top three.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
A Lune at Last
Today Slam Poet did a competition with my students featuring lunes, eleven word poems. Kind of the American version of haiku, they are arranged in lines of three-five-three words. "If you can write a good lune, you can write anything," he told the kids. "A lune should be a tiny three act play or an entire story in eleven words." Of course they rose to the challenge.
Here's one of mine:
How come my
dad was nothing like Kurt's
dad on Glee?
Here's one of mine:
How come my
dad was nothing like Kurt's
dad on Glee?
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