Seen and Unseen

It was still a little dark when a flash of orange in the gully below me caught my attention immediately as I was walking the dog this morning. Next I saw the size of the creature... was it some small dog eluding its leash?

My eyes widened and involuntary Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! s escaped me as I watched the fox dash through the culvert at my feet and follow the line of houses around and into the woods, never looking back even once.

"Did you see that?" I said to my old dog, but alas the answer was no, and so we ambled on into the gloom.

Checks and Balances

Another Tuesday, another "make or break" primary somewhere in these United States. This extraordinary election season could be enough to dismay citizens who appreciate order, predictability, or at least decorum. I might include myself in that categories, and yet I am comforted by...

Alexander Hamilton!

Yes, my friends, I have been inspired by the popularity of that eponymous musical to listen to the audiobook of Ron Chernow's biography of Hamilton. Realistically? I only get 20 minutes or so a day, and so after many weeks I am only to about 1788, but I do now have a thorough understanding of the Federalist papers as well as some early concerns about replacing that "rope of sand," the Articles of Confederation, with the Constitution.

Hamilton was greatly concerned about the reliability of the voting public, but he set his fears aside and worked to construct a government where one yahoo would be incapable of wrecking it for the rest of us.

Thanks, Hamilton!

CSI: The Bunny Trail

After a few scary events, my sister and her husband in Atlanta upgraded their surveillance camera set-up to a pretty comprehensive system. It's great for their security and their peace of mind, but my 8-year-old niece has other ideas.

"We'll finally be able to see what the Easter Bunny really looks like when he hides the eggs in the yard!" she told me the other day.

"That's a problem!" my sister said when Annabelle was out of earshot.

"Why?" I shrugged. "Isn't the Easter Bunny "invisible" sometimes?"

(Here I made air quotes, which amused me, because I can't use them without thinking of the student who actually called them "bunny ears" in conversation. It took me a while to get what he was saying, but his description fit this situation really well!)

"Yah," my sister answered, "but we aren't! And that's who's going to be on camera hiding those eggs!"

Good point.

The Time It Is A-Changing

Regular readers are well aware of my loathing for this day, the day when not only do we lose an hour of the weekend, but we are also forced to rise an hour earlier every morning until October. Over the years I have spun every argument I could, raging against the postponing of the light, although, to be honest, they all go something like, Why? Why? Why?

Slowly, it seems that people are coming around to my side. Just yesterday the NYTimes ran a timely article debunking both the agrarian and energy-saving rationales and quoting citizens who consider DST a prime example of "government over-reach" Some states are even questioning whether it is truly the wisest expression of Federalism (thank you, Alexander Hamilton 😕).

We live in a time where it seems like radical change is becoming common. Who knows? Maybe the day is coming when I'll have to look harder to find a writing topic on the second Sunday in March.

Ooh! Ooh!

Despite gray skies and the fact that the famous cherry blossoms are still a week or more away, there were a lot of folks at the Tidal Basin when we headed over there to walk the dog this afternoon. It seemed like a mix of locals and tourists, but to be honest it was a challenge to tell who was who in this very diverse area, and we heard a rich variety of languages as we ambled around the trail. In such a situation it's always fun to people-watch and today did not disappoint: there were plenty of cute kids on scooters, lots of smiling dogs, and no shortage of selfie-takers.

As we passed the Jefferson Memorial I noticed two women pointing across the water in confusion. "Do you know what that is?" one asked a young father with his toddler daughter on his shoulders.

I literally had to stop myself from waving my hand in the air to show that I knew the answer to their question. Instead I watched intently as we approached to see what would happen.

"No, I don't," the guy answered, and just then I caught one of the women's eye. The poor guy was still apologizing, saying something like, "It must be kind of new, because I've never seen it before, either..." when I jumped in.

"That white thing?" I asked pointing, and when she nodded, I continued breathlessly. "It's the Martin Luther King Memorial!"

"Thank you!" she said.

"You're welcome," I replied as we walked past. "I love knowing the answer!" I told Heidi a minute later.

"I know you do, Babe," she said. "I know you do."

As Writers Do

My students are doing the Slice of Life challenge this month, and that has given us a lot to talk about. Not only am I privileged to read 100 words or more of personal writing from each every day, what's even better are the conversations we have about writing. In addition to highlighting golden lines and showing them exactly why it's important to use punctuation and capitalization, we talk a lot about how to find a topic every day.

"But nothing exciting happens to me!" many have cried.

"That's not the point," I tell them. "The idea is find something, maybe big, maybe small, and write about it. Experiment! Try figurative language, or sensory description, or adding dialog, or making a connection to another time. Write about what annoyed you, or what made you happy for even the smallest moment. What surprised you? What made you think?"

And they have responded. "Look!" one student called me over. "I wrote 150 words about 30 seconds! It took me much longer to write it than it did for it to happen!"

"You exploded the moment! Awesome!" I congratulated her.

Other kids are really getting it, too, and we are beginning to converse as writers do. Yesterday I had my ukulele at school, and so I pulled it out and strummed a few cords right before lunch. Everyone laughed at the silly song I made up. "Are you going to write about that?" one of my students asked.

I shrugged. "Maybe. Are you?"

"Maybe," she shrugged back.

Later I saw her outside with her PE class. It was a beautiful day and I was taking a quick walk before a meeting. "Are you going to write about walking?" she called.

"Maybe!" I answered. "Are you going to write about this gorgeous day?"

"Maybe!" she answered.

Busy Town

As I walking the dog this morning, the world was full of activity: robins bobbed on greening grass; squirrels scampered and scurried up and down trees in sets of two and three; young professionals checked their smartphones as they waited at the bus stop; children practiced soccer on the field up at the school.

Something about it reminded me of Richard Scarry's Busy Town, a book my brother, sister, and I loved when we were little. In fact I half expected to see a calico cat in a white jacket delivering milk. Scarry's books were a combination of large-scale illustrations of complex scenes in between pages with explicitely-labeled single images from the big pictures, and looking back on it, I learned a lot of vocabulary from them. For example, I never rode a train until I was 14 years old, but I knew what a conductor was. Likewise, I was familiar with a toboggan and a trowel, and a lot of other things that gave me a foot up on reading comprehension.

Yesterday our language arts meeting was focused on authentic vocabulary instruction, and the presenter mentioned the 32-million word gap that many children in low-income families experience by age four. In essence, researchers found that the affected children heard on average 8 million fewer words spoken to them a year, so that by the time they were four and ready for preschool, they already had a 32 million word deficit, which translated into both a more limited vocabulary and a more limited capacity for learning vocabulary.

We didn't talk about it, but one instructional intervention to help those kids catch up with their peers is to use visuals alongside key vocabulary whenever possible. The situation also may explain the rise in popularity of graphic novels, particularly among below-grade level readers.

That Richard Scarry was really on to something!