More Blast From the Past

When I taught at UCAS I used to do writing circles where we picked a topic and then wrote on it. I picked a different group to work with each time. When I was finally down to organizing the last of my filing, I found several of these pieces that I apparently never saved in a digital form -- here is one of them.

Gifting from the Comfort of Your Home

There are two things in life that I truly hate: calling people on the phone and shopping in the mall at Christmas time. Some people find it exhilarating and exciting to shop at malls when they are wall-to-wall people--I am not one them. I don't like being jostled, I don't like noise, and I most definitely don't like waiting in lines.

Because of this, I have become a dedicated internet shopper. There is something intrinsically exciting about getting packages in the mail. Someone has to do something to keep the postal service in business, right? 

Of course there are a few downsides to internet shopping--the shipping can be expensive, the clothes occasionally don't fit, and you have to do something with all those boxes. Speaking of boxes, I like to break mine down and get them into the recycle bin before anyone notices that I just got another eleven boxes in the mail. Heck, internet shopping is the reason I HAVE a recycle bin.

However, once you have destroyed the evidence, you are still faced with the dilemma of where to store the contents of said eleven boxes. If you follow my concept of complete anti-surprise, you will just leave the contents out on the counter, and the recipients have to pretend to be surprised when the items show up in their birthday/Christmas package a week later.

The real problem surfaces when the items you just ordered from the internet don't fit, or even worse but occasionally true, are rejected out of hand by the giftees. You are then faced with two choices: stand in a long line at the post office to mail them back, usually on your dime, or take them back to the mall/store where you will have to deal with crowds, lines, and noise.

Really, when it comes to shopping for gifts, it's a lose-lose world.

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 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.

Thoughts on Cars

I know I was meant for greater things than this. I mean I was born on an assembly line in Detroit, or maybe it was Korea, or Japan, or…but I digress. I rolled off the assembly line looking sharp and fine—a beautiful green 1972 Dodge Dart. I thought I’d be leading the pole at the Indie 500, or escorting beautiful young ladies and their dates to Senior Proms, or at least driving a semi-normal person somewhere. Instead what I got was a whole family full of insane teenagers, mostly boys, who took turns driving me into the dirt. If it wasn’t one thing—backing into the high school Poli-Sci teacher in the school parking lot—it was another thing—leaving me unlocked in front of the high school with the key inside so that anyone from anywhere can just hop in and take me for a ride. The crowning insult was when my speedometer, gas meter, and pretty much else had stopped working. Instead of giving me my well deserved rest, they just kept driving me. Everywhere. And, most embarrassing, if I ran out of gas, they just left me on the side of the road. It happened often enough that people began to laugh about the Decker Green Machine, out of gas again. I finally gained revenge. One day as I was driving down to Show Low for the big football game, my driver made the mistake of attempting to go over 40 miles per hour in me. In protest, I broke my fan belt and propelled my fan blade 20 feet in the air, right out of the green hood, leaving a lovely little hood scoop where a fan had once been. It was a noisy protest, but it finally got results. They never drove me again.

Science Fiction . . . or Fact?

Wow. I've got to try this with my science oriented kids -- Lab Lit: Writing Fiction Based on Real Science.

Writing with the Kids

Here is some writing I did in front of my students, with my students, in my classes yesterday a la Kelly Gallagher. We brainstormed about the tastes of our childhood, and then I quickly wrote a paragraph about one of mine from my list. Then it was their turn, and they wrote while I edited and revised my original paragraphs. Here are the edited versions--I wish I'd kept the originals!

Lemons with Salt:

Just looking at this is making my mouth water.

I’ve always been a real hoarder—just of things that are very important. So it comes as no surprise that I’ve kept every book I ever owned. Occasionally I go back through those old books, and when I do, I often find brown stains and a gritty substance between the pages. Rather than reducing the book’s value in my eyes, this residue always make me smile. I know what it means—someone (that would be me) ate a lemon with salt and got a little too excited, spilling some of that salty, sour goodness out onto the page for someone else to find years later. Today I can’t eat lemons with salt—it really wreaks havoc with your tooth enamel, but thanks to the stains, I’ll always have the memories of those lazy days spent reading my precious books and enjoying an escape from the everyday world of my small-town existence.


Cheddar Cheese: (this one didn't really get edited) 

Where are the saltine crackers?

Of all the foods we used to have at my mother’s house, there are probably none with as much emotional baggage as plain old cheddar cheese. My mom used to buy it in great hunks cut directly from the even larger hunk the butcher kept in the front case. She didn’t know that there were any other kinds of cheese. American? Never even knew that existed until I went to college. Parmesan? Mozzarella? Gouda? Nope. Everything from pizza to spaghetti was topped with good old yellow cheddar. We even cut pieces from it to nibble on like hairless rodents as we vegetated in front of the TV. So, to me, cheese will always be cheddar, the more the better, and skip everything else.

Hmmm...I think I'll pass....

Pecan Sandies:
As someone who teaches about memories and writing, I am fully aware that some people say that food memories are some of the strongest. If this really is the case, then I should probably stay far, far, away from pecan sandies. Pecan sandies aren’t as common now as they once were, but for you who are uninitiated, they are strange, hard, tasteless little cookies made by those infamous Keebler elves. At some point in my hazy elementary years, I came down with a severe case of strep throat. My parents didn’t believe in doctors, mainly because we didn’t have medical insurance, so they didn’t take me in to see one until I was nearly done for. By that time, I could barely open my mouth, and I was mildly delirious with a high fever. The doctor stood about ten feet away as he looked at my throat, which by now was as white as cotton. It didn’t take him long to diagnose strep. He sent me home with an antibiotic. My sweet mom thought food made everything better, so on the way home, as she filled the prescription, she purchased a box of pecan sandies. For reasons only known to my seven or eight year old self, I ate several and then promptly threw up. That was the last food I had for several days, as I was relegated to laying in bed and drooling into a cup for the next 48 hours. All I kept thinking about was the terrible taste of those pecan sandies, both going down and coming up. To this day, I shudder when I see that ubiquitous yellow package sitting on a grocery shelf. I’m old enough now to know that food can make you feel better, but not when you are too sick to enjoy it. So, when my own kids are sick, I bring them books and video games instead of food, and we all stay much happier.

Awkward

I thought it might be fun to share some more writing. This isn't my best effort, but, hey, at least I'm trying. This was a piece I wrote with my students about an awkward moment:

Awkward!!!

Denée Tyler

I am going to Arizona for Thanksgiving. I’m not going to the warm, sunny part of Arizona. I’m going to the windy, cold, desolate part of Arizona called Snowflake. Why? Well, my parents and a brother live there, but one of the major reasons for my decision was to see my grandmother. She is 84 years old and still in pretty good health, but I realize that she could be gone at any moment, so I want to visit her again while I can. The original plan was to meet up with her at an extended family turkey fest, but that plan has been torpedoed by the ultimate of awkward situations.

My husband and I have a few guilty pleasures, and one of them is watching a new television show on the CW network called Ringer. In the show, one twin sister, Bridgette, is a key witness to a murder, and Bridgette is too scared to stay and testify, so she runs to her estranged twin, Siobhan, for advice and protection. As soon as the sisters are together, they go out on a boat and Siobhan supposedly goes overboard, leaving the Bridgette the perfect opportunity: take Siobhan’s place and identity, including her husband. Convoluted? Yes. But that is only the edge of the iceberg. As Bridgette continues impersonating her twin, she discovers that Siobhan has been having an affair with Siobhan’s best friend’s husband, who also is supposedly a great friend of Siobhan’s husband. And not only that, but Siobhan (and now Bridgette) still meets and talks to this best friend, Gemma, everyday. What do they talk about? Who the mystery woman is that Gemma’s husband is cheating with.

AWKWARD!!!

What does this have to do with the turkey fest? I have many cousins in my Grandmother’s family, but I have two in particular we’ll call Tom and Bob. Well, I’ve just found out that Tom has admitted that he has been having an affair with Bob’s wife. And he’s tired of keeping it a secret, so he just wants to come out in the open and marry Bob’s wife as soon as she and Bob can get divorced. ARGGHHH. This is going to ruin every family get together for the rest of time—or at least until Tom and Bob’s wife get tired of each other and move on to someone else.

AWKWARD!!!

As I watched Ringer, I would think about how incredibly insensitive and crass the whole situation was.  I used to find it unbelievable that someone could betray a friend AND a spouse so callously. Now that I’ve seen the situation in my own family, I guess I’ll change my thinking on that. I guess people really can be that self centered and cruel.

AWKWARD!!!

Newspaper Blackout Poetry

I've simply got to try this with my students this year.



http://readingyear.blogspot.com/2012/04/petty-theft-newspaper-blackout-poem.html

http://newspaperblackout.com/

Blue, Blue, My World is Blue

Here is another sample of my writing from the writing circle groups in our class.

Blue: A Couch Story

Denée Tyler

1981 – Blue Macramé Couch Belonging to David and Sandra D________

A large and roughly handsome football player in the middle of an intense game of “Do You Love Your Neighbor?” slams his full body weight into the couch and breaks the entire macramé frame. The couch is never quite the same, and the boyfriend fades into distant memory.

1986 – Blue Flowered Couch from the Side of the Road in Atlantic Highlands, NJ

A new mother comes home from the hospital to find that her husband has dumpster dived a couch to replace the folding chairs formerly used. Her rear end is eternally grateful even as she soaks the whole thing in Lysol.

1989 – Blue Velveteen Sectional with Double Recliners

Industrious mother dumps entire bottle of rubber cement on a seat cushion while making quiet books to entertain a precocious three year old. After much scraping, soaking, and crying, everything looks almost good as new.

1995 – Blue Velveteen Sectional with Hide-A-Bed

Hyper five and nine year-olds use bed as a makeshift trampoline. All is well until the springs separate from the frame and the entire bed drops abruptly to the floor. No one is hurt, just too scared to tell mom.

1999/2000 – Blue Corner Section of Aforementioned Velvet Sectional

During an epic New Year’s Eve party, the corner section gets one too many fanny-first dives and completely gives way, leading to a chair that now sits approximately ten inches off the ground. Many fingers are pointed, but no one will admit to being the final fanny.

2007 – Blue Velveteen Sectional/Blue Microfiber Theater Group

Family spends all day carting large heavy couches up from the basement. Many walls are dinged, and fingers are smashed. Couch goes to its new home down the street in order to make way for new microfiber theater grouping (all recliners!!).

2009 – Blue Microfiber Theater Group

Family discovers that all recliners can be a bad thing when there is a flaw in the recliner release mechanism. After several of the new chairs break, father gets fed up and replaces the mechanism in every chair.

2011 – Blue Microfiber Theater Group

Family enjoys leisure time together stretched out on their recliners enjoying marathon viewing sessions of The Amazing Race, Harry Potter, Pride and Prejudice, and Nickelodeon’s Avatar: the Last Airbender (the TV series, NOT the movie). All couches currently in working condition. Life is good.

Replying to Poetry

As I was searching through my renaissance files, I rediscovered this little piece of poetry I penned in 2008 in response to The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.

(Hey, I'm just trying to keep up with Sir Walter Raleigh!)

Writing Circles

It's that time of year when my students and I participate in writing circles. I do it along with my students. Here is some of my work from this year:

Less is More?

Fellow EC Ninger Keith Schoch recently posted an interesting blog about getting students to write more precisely--quality over quantity.

His ideas range from 6 Word Memoirs, to One Word Quickwrites, to Overheard Everywhere, and stories ranging from one to six sentences. It's a great trove of tiny treasures!!

I've tried some of these ideas, and they really do get students thinking and working. Here's his post.

Scribblish

I am always on the lookout for games that I can add to my classroom. My criteria is that they have to involve writing and interaction, support 20 to 30 students playing at once, and take about 20 minutes - the amount of time we usually have when we have an occasional party day (Halloween, the half day before Christmas and the last day of school). It's very hard to find a game that a whole classroom can participate in and have fun with.

We had recently played Scribblish with our married kids, and I thought that it might be a fun game to try in the classroom. Working in groups of 6-8 students, students each write a phrase, then the next person draws the phrase, then the next person describes the drawing, etc., until you have 4 phrases and 3 drawings. Like any telephone game (each person only sees what the person before them drew/wrote) the end result is miles away from the beginning and very entertaining to boot. There is a timer element involved, so the action is fast and furious. I obviously didn't have enough purple rollers to go around, so we used long strips of paper (11x14 cut into 4 strips) that we folded over.

We tried this game at the end of class yesterday (the first 1/2 hour was spent sharing Zombie Haiku and 55 Fiction). It went over great. Add in a little homemade root beer to the mix, and all my students were saying it was the best party ever!

Creating my own Mentor Text

Drawing on the superb example of Penny Kittle, here is an alternate point of view piece. (This is the story of my son's piñata breaking injury episode from the point of view of the piñata.)

The Short, Brief Life of a Cub Scout Piñata
(alternate point of view)

by Denée Tyler

-->
My life began simply enough as a pile of paper pulp in a factory somewhere in Mexico. One day the craftsman took the pulp, wet it down, formed it around a mold, covered it with crepe paper, and voila, I came into being, a small blue boy with a strange-looking blue cap and a garish smile. I hung with several hundred of my brothers as I dried and contemplated my purpose in life.

Before I was able to complete my meditations, I was abruptly packed into a close, dark box with others of my kind. There wasn’t enough room to speak and scarcely air to breathe, and we really thought that this was the end.

Just when I had given up all hope, the box was opened, and several pimply young men wearing shirts that said “Macey’s Groceries” pulled all of us out and hung us crookedly from a flimsy string. I had to endure the staring, pointing, and jeering of many until a large, jovial man abruptly pulled me down from my precarious perch and said, “This would be perfect for our Blue and Gold Banquet.” Then, to complete the insult, he summarily stuffed me with tootsie rolls. Of all the candy in the world . . .

The man took me to a place called a “cultural hall.” This was obviously a cruel misuse of the name, as there was no culture in sight. Instead, a rope was tied around my neck, the rope was thrown over a basketball standard, and I was raised and lowered over a group of rather unscrupulous looking eight-, nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-olds in blindfolds. I could only continue to smile my vapid, painted-on smile as these same children proceeded to hit me all about the head and body with a four-foot length of PVC pipe. Oh, the cruelty of man to man!

I endured their blows for at least a half an hour while the parents and leaders of these little heathens stood around the circle and cheered them on. Despite the fact that I was only made of paper, I held firm and determined not to let them break me. Even as a piece of my foot and a part of my sweet, sugary innards fell, I remained strong.

Unfortunately, once the small torturers lost interest, the adults around the circle took over. A brawny man, who professed to be the parent of one of the yapping children, declared that he would finish me off. He took hold of the PVC pipe and gave a mighty swing.

I could feel the force of the blow coming, and although I tried to brace myself, my strength was spent at last. I could only stare and smile in amazement as my neck separated from my head, and my blue-clad body dropped on the savage crowd below. They fell on my sad remains like a flock of ravening vultures, snarling and grabbing with abandon and extreme bad manners.

But what was this? Could it be? As I gasped out my last, I felt the glory of sweet revenge. As the deathblow was struck, the PVC object of my pain broke in two, and the severed end flew forth like the arrow of justice and took out two of my tormentors. One was merely grazed, but the other, one Caleb Tyler, received the force of the pipe full on in the middle of his forehead, causing a huge ruckus, raising an enormous goose egg, and resulting in a trip to the emergency room. And thus, my glorious end is a lesson to all who would meddle with . . . Cub Scout piñatas!

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.

Sensory Writing

I've been trying to do a little more with sensory writing this semester. In addition to writing about art, I've had the kids eat a Rice Krispy treat while writing about how they would describe it to someone from another planet, and I've had them compare a character from The Importance of Being Earnest to a tootsie roll pop. The kids seem to like it (and the treats don't hurt their engagement, either).

Ideas for Poetry Portfolio

I used these ideas with my students to get their minds wrapped around poetry, but also to get their minds thinking that words are everywhere. These exercises helped them get ready for our Poetry Out Loud competition.

1. Ekphrastic Poetry:

2. Cento: From the Latin word for "patchwork," the cento is a poetic form made up of lines from poems by other poets.







3. Road Sign Poetry



4. Word Ticket/Paint Chip Poem

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 Demonstration Lesson

Complete lesson plan with links
Handout
PowerPoint
Student examples