Candy and Me

This is some writing I did at at Kimberly Hill Campbell's CUWP Saturday Workshop. It was based on two chapters we read from this sweet book.

Never for me the siren call of chocolate or licorice or gumdrops. Sweetness is not my friend. Give me sour, really sour, and please make it lasting. I despise candies that tease you with a sour burst before betraying it with a middle of unsatisfying bland sweetness. I prefer a sourness that lasts all the way through.

As a child, I satisfied this lust with Jolly Roger sticks, purchased for ten cents at the movie theater. One stick carefully peeled would last for an entire movie. As you licked and licked, the stick would slowly bend until you had a lovely curl just before it became so thin you could see through it and then it broke off in your mouth, giving you a quick burst of overwhelming sourness.

As I grew, I skipped the candy altogether and went right to the mother ship. I began eating lemons, not with sugar but with a little salt on them. Oh those were heavenly days, tucked up in a corner of our ranch house, curled up with a good book and lemons with salt. I still have some of my favorite books from my childhood, and all of them have yellow stains on the pages from errant drips of lemony-salty goodness.

As an adult, I am facing some of the ravages of a sugar coated and lemon juice filled childhood. I have had more than my share of large cavities, root canals, and caps on my teeth. Sometimes I even have nightmares that all my teeth are falling out. I've had to give up all candy binges, and my teeth are far too sensitive to indulge in lemons. Luckily I'll always have the honeyed memories of a sweet childhood full of blissful sourness.

Found Writing

So--I have a new job this year. I'm at Mountain Ridge Junior High teaching 8th and 9th grade English. It's been a whirlwind beginning of the year and overall pretty awesome.
I set up some genre example files per Nancie Atwell's new In the Middle book, and as I was doing so, I found a piece of my writing that apparently I'd never actually saved on any computer. I think I wrote this while I was doing writing circles with my former students. I rather liked it so I am posting it here. The next time I post, I'll give you a virtual tour of my new room, because, frankly, it's the coolest room ever.

The Beach Chair Test

They say that confession is good for the soul, and mine can use all the help it can get, so I have something fairly shocking to tell the world. Are you sitting down? Are you listening? Here goes.

I didn’t wash my car last year.

Isn’t that awful? What’s worse is this: I don’t intend to wash it this year either. Isn’t that terrible? And to make it even worse, I haven’t washed my car for at least two years. The last time I remember washing my car was when the local high school did it for free.

Washing my car is one of the things I don’t do because it doesn’t pass my beach chair test. When I’m old and relaxing at the beach and looking back at my life, I’m not going to be saying: “Geez, I wish I’d spent more time washing my car. If I had driven around town and up to work every day in a sparkly clean car, my life would have been complete.”

Applying my beach test keeps me from doing a lot of supposedly useful things from dusting furniture to holding a grudge to decorating for the holidays. That’s not to say I never do those things, because I do. It’s just that I give myself permission to let things slide once in a while (well, maybe even more than that, but who’s counting). Every year I put up fewer and fewer Christmas decorations. And you know, I never regret it. When I’m able to spend the days after Christmas relaxing and enjoying and doing things with my family rather than rolling up thousand of tiny little white lights, then I don’t mind that my house doesn’t look like it dropped right out of the Christmas issue of Martha Stewart Living.

The best thing my chair test does is to remind me that it’s better to do things than to own things. I may wish I had taken more trips, gone to more plays, attended more live concerts. As I look back, I remember the time and people and places and not the dollar signs. It’s not likely that I’ll be thinking, “I wish I’d bought a bigger house and a fancier car.”

Above all else, the chair test is personal. A thing that flunks my test may be the number one thing you’ll reach for from your beach chair, even before the little drink with the umbrella in it. And that’s the beauty of the test—it guarantees that you always get what you really want. And I believe that determining and reaching for what you really want is both the beginning and the end of this little vacation we call life.

Someday -- Eileen Spinelli

At a CUWP meeting recently, we did some writing modeled on this book. Here is what I came up with--this is not edited and is pretty rough. I started out pretty down but tried to put a twist and positive spin on the end.

Someday I will have my house all to myself. I won't have to pick up after anyone, I'll cook whatever I want for dinner, I'll play whatever music I want as loud as I want to. I'll close off all the bathrooms but one, and I'll only run the washing machine and dryer every other week. The kitchen floor will go months between moppings because it doesn't need it, not because I  don't have time. I won't have to compete for TV time or computer time, and it will be so peaceful that I'll finally finish writing the novel I've been working on for the last five years.

Today I'll return home to a house with three teenagers, all of them messy. Most likely I'll have a group of dubious smelling teenage boys show up around 5 PM to play dungeons and dragons with my youngest son, and my daughter will Skype with her "friend who is a boy from California" for most of the afternoon. My oldest son will bring a stack of dishes ten inches high up from the bowels of the basement where he has apparently been using them to attract rodents. If there ever is a moment of peace, my married daughter and her husband will come over and loudly play every YouTube video they can think of and laugh themselves silly.

Someday my life will be lonely. . . today, it is full.

I think this would be a great way to start out a school year -- kids could write about how things are for them now, and what they want to know/do by the end of the year.

The Castle on the Rock

Edinburgh Castle, with the sign of our hostel just visible

Here is some writing I did at a recent CUWP Workshop. We were assigned to write about our best vacation, then we turned and paired and shared, and our partner suggested something we could expand on and explain more. This is a peer review technique where after reading a peer's paper, the student reviewer generates a list of questions she has about the topic. The writer takes the list and considers them, adding and updating his paper as needed. The section in blue is what I added after my pair/share partner asked me to explain what in the heck was a youth hostel.

Well, my best vacation ever, hands down, would have to be last year's trip to England and Scotland with my husband and best friend, Mark. We have wanted to go to England for years, and we finally decided to just go for it. One fun thing about it was that we alternated between really nice destinations and funky destinations, and so we stayed in 5 star hotels and youth hostels (sharing bathrooms with teenagers) on the same trip. 

What The Castle on the Rock Youth Hostel looks like from the front

One particular hostel we stayed in was situated directly below Edinburgh Castle. Edinburgh castle is an imposing structure situated directly on a giant rock. We would walk out of our hostel, look up, and there was this amazing structure.

Youth hostels are a cross between extremely low budget hotels and college dormitories. You pay for the use of a bed (bedding is extra). They generally have a giant common area and even a kitchen you can use if you want to. There is only one bathroom for all the people who are there, male and female (the showers and toilets, of course, are private). So, everyone is using the same bathroom, and you may be shaving next to a 15 year old who is putting on all his Goth, complete with liner and piercings. This disconcerted my husband a bit. 

The front desk where we checked in every night

Luckily for us, though, we didn't have to sleep dormitory style; for a little bit extra we had a private room with one double bed and a sink. The room was called Antony and Cleopatra. We had to get the desk service person to buzz us into the hostel every night, and when he did, he would say, "Oh yes, it's Antony and Cleopatra."

The funky staircase, complete with Knight in Shining Armor

We also went carless and depended on our feet, taxis, trains, buses, and the underground for all of our transportation, which was an adventure in and of itself. We also had those fun little challenges that always make our vacations memorable, such as rain every single day except one—so much rain that the train we were traveling on from Edinburgh to London was washed out and we had an entire day of rain delay.  Oh, what a fun vacation it was.

So...I felt like it was a better mini-write with the addition, and I tried this with some success with my students. Some of them had some problems coming up with questions, but I think that is probably one of the best parts of this...both reviewer and writer have to do a little thinking.

What the common room looked like pretty much everyday we were there (minus the sun)

The Decapitation of a Carrot

I found this old writing from a CUWP advanced institute. We were shown this funny picture and had to tell what was going on from the point of view of something in it. It will be obvious what I picked.

Mine is a lonely life. I spend most of my days in a dark and crowded drawer. On this particular day, I was pulled from my reverie and slapped ruthlessly on a table. I wondered what was coming next – soft warm bread, a juicy steak, at the very least a ripe red tomato? But, no. It was a puny little carrot with a most alarmed look on its face. How ignoble. Me, once the very heart of a mighty maple, reduced to bearing an mere insignificant root vegetable. It was almost a relief to feel the snick of the knife and know that my humiliation was over.

Walk and Write

Here is my writing from the walk and write I did during a CUWP session on the BYU campus. Enjoy!

As I sit here looking at this broad expanse of windows, I can't help but think--why? What is so beautiful on the other side that merits such an expansive view? I guess it all depends on where your point of view lies. Directly opposite there is a building that is nondescript and really unremarkable. Here in front there is a lovely courtyard--but nothing too incredible.
But if you let your gaze move upwards, you are suddenly gifted with an amazing view of majestic mountain peaks punctuated by the rather large and conspicuous Y above BYU. This brings back memories of clear mornings as a freshman here when you could suddenly see the mountains again and realize what a beautiful setting this really is.

Where is he going--this young man with guitar in hand, striding purposefully across the campus at 10:30 AM on a Saturday morning? It's a little too early to be going to a rock concert and a little too late for waking your true love from bed with a morning serenade. Perhaps he is heading somewhere as mundane as a Saturday morning guitar session, or perhaps he is on his way to try out for a position in the latest group. His heart is in his throat and pounding as he thinks about this chance, perhaps his last chance, to make it big--or at least as big as you can get here in the sleepy berg of Provo, Utah.

Reflections on My Sixth Year

In exactly one week, I will finish my sixth year of teaching. In some ways this has been a great year; in some, the worst ever. I've had to deal with seizures (my own!) seventy-two hour EEGs, and shoulder surgery. I've been more scatterbrained than I ever remember being in my life. I've dealt with reluctant learners, one of whom was my own child. I've occasionally felt like I was doing a great job teaching and often felt like I was the worst teacher in the world.

I think it's probably time for a major overhaul of my curriculum to get me out of my doldrums. We recently read Write Like This by Kelly Gallagher for the CUWP book group, and it really got me thinking about what I'm having my students write and why. I loved what Kelly said in the book about a fantasy meeting with a former student years from now:

"Excitedly, she blurts out: 'Oh, it is so good to see you! I was hoping to run into you some day so that I can tell you that I am still writing essays that analyze the author's use of tone. I  keep a Tone Journal at home, and I apply that skill you taught me twenty years ago in the tenth grade to everything I read today! Let's have lunch some day so I can share all the essays I have written recognizing the author's tone found in all the books I have read since high school graduation."

Instead, he says he'd rather hear about the blog they're writing, or the letter they've sent to every member of congress about some issue.

Anyway, I am going to redo my curriculum so that we're doing a lot more real world writing. For example, this year I had my students write sonnets. Dumb idea. It was painful for them to do and painful for me to read.

One of my goals for this summer (and hopefully to continue through the school year next year) is to read and USE one professional book a month. Actually, maybe I'll try for two a month over the summer. I have quite a few that look like they'd be very helpful if I actually read them. Ha.

Anyway, I have one more week with this particular crop of kids, and I hope they've taken away at least one useful thing from my class this year. They did do spectacularly well on their end of level tests, and that seems to be all that our school really worries about as far as whether I'm a good teacher or not. For myself, I'd like to think the bar is a bit higher.

The Perfect Accompaniment to Zombie Haiku

A great way to get students excited about the undead. I love the animation.

Kelly Gallagher Workshop

The Kelly Gallagher writing and modeling workshop sponsored by CUWP this Saturday was, literally, amazing. I left feeling so energized!

I took copious notes, but for now I'll just leave you with a favorite story. Kelly sat by the CEO of a "big computer company" on a recent flight. The CEO mentioned that they strive to hire the best and the brightest--graduates of Harvard, MIT, etc., but they have a hard time finding candidates. Kelly asked why, and the CEO said, "Because it's really easy to find really smart people, but it's hard to find smart people who know how to think."

Wow. That kind of sums up my job in a nutshell. I (try my darnedest to) teach kids how to think! That's why I think my job is so rewarding.

Teaching Nonfiction Writing - A Practical Guide

This was the latest read for the CUWP Book group. It proved to live up to its name--practical! Although it felt like it was geared towards kids from about fourth grade through junior high, I still found a lot of things in it that I put to immediate use in the classroom. I used a genre exploration (bringing in about 40 nonfiction books, biographies, magazines, etc.) before I assigned my students to do their Chaucer presentations. Because the kids had a better idea of what I was looking for (illustrations, things that could go in a sidebar, definitions, quotes, headings, etc.) I had the best Chaucer presentations I've ever had.

This book has a great little section on leads that many of us were talking about at the book group last night. I can't wait to try it out.

I've already noticed that I am more aware of pointing out the various techniques in the nonfiction pieces that we've read recently. For example, I always have the students read "The Man in the Water" in conjunction with Beowulf and our talk about heroes. This time when we read it, I made sure that the students noticed the craft Rosenblatt uses, i.e. when he uses imagery in the first paragraph: The jets from Washington National Airport that normally swoop around the presidential monuments like famished gulls are, for the moment, emblemized by the one that fell.

Speaking of book group, we had an incredible turnout last night. We are going to need a bigger room next time.

Mrs. Tyler Takes a Plunge

I did something completely out of character for me this week. I've been getting emails from the leaders of CUWP urging us to submit to the Utah English Journal for publication. Normally I would be too shy, but I decided to give it a try. I've submitted a paper detailing how I combine Sherman Alexie and memoir to start off my American Literature class. I won't find out for about a week or so if they have accepted my paper or not. Whew. I am actually nervous about it. It's like sending a baby out into the cold cruel world.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

This book by Anne Lamott is the next CUWP Reading Group Choice. We will be meeting October 7th at 5:30 at the Provo Brick Oven. I am really looking forward to reading and discussing it.

Zombie Haiku

We had so much fun doing Zombie Haiku at CUWP that I had my students do some in October. They loved it! (Maybe a little too much)
Here is the PowerPoint I used to introduce it. I actually embedded the things I link to into the presentation.

Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words

I was first introduced to this book at CUWP. I've been wanting to use it ever since, and now that we are doing Poetry Out Loud, this is my big chance. We spent about half of a class period making word tickets. Word tickets means that the students had a big pile of magazines and newspapers from which they were supposed to choose interesting words. After they got their words, they cut them out and glued them onto carnival-type tickets.

I had every student choose ten nouns, ten verbs, and ten "others," so we had around 900 words or so by the time they had finished. Then everyone got 10-15 random words and used as many as they wanted to create phrases and images to inspire poetry. My students had a fantastic time choosing words (and it was very educational, too, as they spent a lot of time arguing and teaching each other which words were and were not nouns and verbs). I will post some of their best works here after I've gone over all of their portfolios.

The Secret Knowledge of Grownups

I bought this book at CUWP, and I've been meaning to use it all year as a Scribble. I finally found a time when I thought it would work well, since my students were learning about Romanticism. Romanticism privileged children and childhood, right? So--what better time to write from a child's perspective.

In the book, the author takes those basic nagging rules that all parents have: don't pick your nose, eat your vegetables, etc., and comes up with a wacky secret reason behind them. For example, you shouldn't pick your nose because you might accidentally deflate your brain.

My students took the ball and ran with it. They came up with some great secrets--about everything from aiming urine to talking to strangers. I gave them a 17 x 11 piece of paper and had them fold it like a book. They put their rule and the supposed reason (Eat Your Vegetables - Because they are good for you.) on the outside and then they put the real secret reason and optional illustrations on the inside. As a culminating activity, I had the students pass their completed booklets around the class. That way everyone got to see what their peers had come up with, and we all got to have a few laughs.

CUWP Reading Group

Well, due to my general insanity, I've taken on yet another project. I volunteered to be in charge of the reading groups for CUWP. The last book we read was The Digital Writing Workshop by Troy Hicks. Our next book choice is Penny Kittle's Write Beside Them. We will meet on the 3rd of June and discuss the book. So far it has been a lot of fun. I sometimes get a little over my head with book groups for professional books. I've purchased all the books for the EC NING groups, but I've only ever finished three of them: Jim Burke's What's the Big Idea?, Tom Newkird's Holding on to Good Ideas and Kelly Gallagher's Readicide. Anyway, here is looking forward to a new month of school - only 33 days of instruction and 3 days of testing until the last day of school. Yikes!!!

CUWP Demonstration Lesson

Complete lesson plan with links
Handout
PowerPoint
Student examples

Thoughts on the CUWP

Wow!!

I have enjoyed this group so much. It is invigorating and inspiring to be with a bunch of people who all love to write and want to learn more about writing. The freewrite responses every morning have been fantastic. Today was the first time we had a chance to share our writing with our immediate writing group. We each had a very different style of writing that we brought to review. Mine was very personal in nature, Janette's was humorous, Serena had employed a unique point of view, and Eric, our resident mathematician, had an informative piece that proved both challenging and interesting to review. We also had our first demonstration lesson (dl) today. Amy did a great job at teaching us some of the pre-writing strategies she used with Pride and Prejudice this year. Our only regret as a group was that she didn't have any of us write. We were all ready to go after hearing her activities. After listening to the response of the group, I think that everyone wants to write as part of the dl. Chris, one of our facilitators said something like we can't really own a piece and know how we would use it until we write it ourselves. Anyway, even though we didn't get to write I came away with some good ideas. She used some sensory experiences and had us rate them as good or bad. Then she talked about why some of us loved cinnamon bears, and some of us hated them. This led into talk about prejudices. It was especially nice that it opens up the full realm of prejudices and goes beyond just racial ones. She also had an interesting writing prompt where she asked her students to compare a tootsie roll pop to a character in P&P. I immediately thought of how I could use that with Gatsby this year. What a fun (and exhausting) week!