The black blob silhouetted on Anna’s tent top terrified her to the point that she could not peel her eyes off it. It kept tricking her by moving ever so slightly in the shine of a nearly full moon. Her Thermarest was perfectly placed, her sleeping bag snug around her exhausted body, her muscles humming from the day’s uphill hike. All conditions were perfect for a peaceful night’s rest wrapped in the arms of the mountain, except for that shape that kept her eyes pried open. There was no hope of the darkness of sleep to slide over her mind anytime soon, and she knew it. As she lay there, she tried to conjure images that were happy and familiar to her, tried to imagine herself at home, asleep in her big cozy bed. Bella certainly had no trouble; she was curled up at Anna’s feet with her head resting on Anna’s ankle. Just like at home, she was out as soon as the lamp had gone out, her snore just a slight flutter of air through her brown muzzle. “Stupid dog,” Anna thought fondly, “just go on to sleep without me.”
Claustrophobia was a battle Anna continually faced. She had hoped that all the time and energy she spent hiking that day would pay off in an easy drift off to a restful night’s sleep. She always hoped this, and it never worked. Neither the crisp mountain air nor the open night sky could negate the feeling of the stuffy tent and the tightness of the sleeping bag that never seemed to have quite enough room, even though she had paid more than enough money for both specifically because of their roominess. It was a battle in her mind, and she knew there was not a tent or sleeping bag that would make her comfortable enough. She thought for a moment of just leaving Bella in the tent and sleeping out on the ground instead, but there was a threat of rain and a soaked sleeping bag would not be pleasant to deal with. Just as she had in the past, Anna resigned herself to the idea of a broken night’s sleep with hopefully enough rest for her weary muscles to make the next day bearable.
With her eyes still glued to the black blob, Anna scanned her mind over the events of the day. Getting started was simple enough; Bella had been excited about the trip ever since Anna pulled out her old back pack. The chocolate Labrador had been bouncing around their little apartment for days, sniffing over all their equipment as if to check its durability. Anna had laid out the tent in the living room and popped it up. Her plan had been to sleep in it for a few nights before the trip in hopes of battling her phobia, but each morning she had awoken in her bed, music blaring from the alarm clock. Regardless of her unconscious move in the night, Bella had stayed in the tent, looking up at Anna with the expression a mother would give a silly child. Even though Anna had several dogs through out her life, none had bonded with her like Bella, and none were as protective as that dog could be. Like a normal lab, Bella was an overactive people lover and not normally wary of strangers, but Anna knew from experience that Bella could sense something about people that Anna herself could not. When Bella was on guard around someone, then Anna knew she should be too.
Anna turned from these fond thoughts to their day on the trail. As they set off from the truck, Bella, who normally stayed at Anna’s left hand, trotted ahead a few yards, sniffing uncontrollably. She then stopped abruptly, cut off into the woods, and circled around behind Anna, taking up her customary spot. Anna assumed she was just checking out their surroundings, making sure everything was in its natural order. Together they fell into the rhythm of the hike and made good time to their first stopping point. Bella splashed into the cold water of the Thompson River as Anna dropped down on a rock to enjoy their first break. The citadel of color in the tree canopy played tricks on the water in still spots, and the dog swam tirelessly, breaking apart the reflections with her sleek body only to have them reunite once she’d passed. At that point in her reflective reverie, Anna started to drift off to sleep, her reminisce from the day morphing more into a dream. Her dream Bella suddenly turned to her from the creek water and asked, “What was that sound?”
Anna sat up suddenly in the tent and hit her forehead on the lamp she’d hung from the loop at the tent’s apex. “Ow, crap!” she said loudly, rubbing her head. She was not the only one awake. Bella stood silently over Anna’s feet. She turned her boxy head toward the woman, and in the moon light in the tent, Anna could see her brown eyes full of warning to be quiet. The dog’s body was aimed at the front of the tent, her tail down in apprehension, the hair between her shoulders bristling slightly. From the left of the tent, a twig snapped loudly, and Anna’s heart quickened in her chest. Bella crouched slightly, still staring at the tent door, still silent. As the leaves rustled closer to the tent, every doubt was erased from the mind of the woman and the dog. Someone was out there, and both the woman and the dog knew that someone was coming into their tent.
A low grumbling started in Bella’s throat, barely audible, as time slowed and Anna’s heart quickened. She knew with clarity that she was going to have to protect herself, and she felt into her sleeping bag for the knife she kept there. She silently unsheathed it and ran her thumb over the blade, checking the sharp scrape and trying to muster her confidence. She had a weapon, she was not going to go easily, and then, time caught up with her heart as adrenaline pumped into her system. It happened in an instant. Deafening barks met the ripping of the tent flap, and the air was suddenly filled with the noise of a struggle. But Anna was not a part of it. She could make out two figures in the low light; her dog and a medium sized person who she figured to be a man from the low grunts emitting from his throat. Bella had him by the forearm as he flailed half in and half out the torn flap of the tent. Reluctant to relent on her grip, Bella’s growls deepened, and suddenly the two creatures disappeared.
The man had backed through the tent flap with the dog in tow. Here he could use his full strength to wrestle with the dog. Anna could see their forms in the light around the tent and thought over her options. There was no time to run by them, and that was no real advantage, especially through thousands of acres of forest barefooted. She would have to face this attacker, but she knew from the struggle going on outside her tent that the man was not armed. If he had been, it was unlikely that Bella would still be alive. No report from a firearm had blasted the air, and Anna could tell that the two were still locked in a fierce struggle. Her knife was ready, and she thought it best to wait for the man to come to her. The rustle of leaves, the growls from Bella, and the man’s curses continued in the night for another few seconds: then Anna heard a heavy thump and total silence.
“Thank you, Bella,” Anna thought, instantly feeling that her dog was gone. Grief would have to come later. There was a man crawling into her tent.
“I bet you aint as tough as that dog,” he said to her. She stayed quiet, and he sat back on his heels to survey his victim. “Not comin for me?” he asked. Anna could see the man’s arm wet with dark liquid and felt her heart warm to what her dog had tried to do for her. “Thanks for the break, lady,” the man said as he caught his breath. Then he moved suddenly to her, trapping her under his thick body. Still in her sleeping bag, Anna’s hand gripped the knife handle tightly, waiting for what she felt would be the right time. “I been watchin you today. You was all stretched out there by the crick on that rock, and I thought to myself, this is gonna be a sweet night,” he breathed into her ear.
With every word, Anna’s resolve thickened. There was no need to plea for her life. There was no need to beg for his mercy. He wouldn’t give it, she knew, and neither would she when it came to be his turn. She could feel him fumbling for the bag zipper, trying to find his way in. Her hand was ready, and, as he yanked down on the zipper pull, she aimed the blade of the knife upright and stabbed directly into his belly through the sleeping bag. He fell back cursing and Anna was instantly out of the sleeping bag. The man grabbed at her ankle as she tried to crawl past him, but she answered him with another quick stab into the soft flesh of his back, just beneath the shoulder blades.
The man kept cursing, swearing from pain and anger and frustration. Anna knew to escape, she was going to have to kill him. Wounding him was not enough. He would find her and finish her eventually even if she did get away tonight. She needed a clean swipe at him. She reached quickly into his shaggy hair and tangled it around her hand. “This is the face you’ll see in your dreams, sweetness,” she heard him say as one hand pulled his head back. Her knife wielding hand swept cleanly across his neck, and her struggle was over. She scrambled out of the tent, with one hand still tightly gripping the knife and the other hand webbed with strands of the man’s hair.
Crawling out of her tent and into the gray misty morning, Anna searched the ground for Bella. She found her crumpled at the foot of a big oak tree where she had hung their backpack. The dog was still, but her brown eyes were open and staring at Anna. As she moved closer, the dog whimpered slightly but a look of relief washed over the canine’s eyes. Anna dropped the pack out of the tree and dug through it for her cell phone. “I can get service from the ridge,” she said to the dog, “Hold tight, girl.”
Within an hour, the forest service swarmed Anna’s campsite. She sat against the trunk of the oak with her dog’s head in her lap, refusing to look into the tent. The signs of a struggle were too obvious for anyone to believe that Anna’s reaction was anything but self defense. Bella had come around more, and, although Anna was unsure of exactly what had gone on between the dog and the man, she was sure that Bella was fine. The two rangers regarded her with a mixture of fear and awe. How could such a normal looking woman have done this? As the area police arrived on the scene, Anna found out that the man who lay lifeless in her tent was a serial rapist. The police matched him immediately with the profile of a man they had been keeping tabs on for months who had recently dropped out of sight. They had been hoping at the very least that he had moved on, and there was no doubt from this scene that Anna was in no way to blame for this man’s death. Not on a legal level, anyway.
Anna looked away as they removed the body and zipped it into its own black, plastic sleeping bag. The men packed her belongings into carefully labeled plastic bags and dropped her tent to a heap on the ground. Anna’s eyes swept over the black North Face logo on the tent’s roof. Her black blob, what had kept her restless through the night, was the triple hump of a silhouetted mountain. Such a simple thing to scare someone so much, and, at that moment, Anna knew her claustrophobia had been overcome. She knew she would be whole, and, within a year, she and Bella found themselves by the Thompson River again.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
If I Had Not Been In Your Life (Biography Poem)
Your morning 10th grade Bob Marley serenades wouldn’t have had a 6th grade Wailer backup
My cries when you hid my books in high places wouldn’t have made you smile
The memory of a pool of blood on the floor wouldn’t come to you
And there would be no thumb with a scar on it
If I had not been in your life, your childhood would have been boring.
If I was not in your life now
Clemson football on satellite would be something you’d have to pay for
The big Chattooga Rapids would be only a sight rather than a ride
No need to offer to carry something up the trail at the end of the river day
You would anyway, but for someone who would let you.
If I wasn’t planning on being an old woman when I die
You wouldn’t worry about me being hard on your boys when they get to my school
You wouldn’t see my brown hair turn gray while your brown hair falls out
You wouldn’t have me to hug when our parents leave us behind
Having me holding on to you to make sure you didn’t slip away with them.
You told me once when we were kids that you wish I had never been born,
Your bratty little sister who still can’t keep her mouth shut
In time to stop her thoughts from falling out
But if I had never been born, you would have never known the difference
And you’d have been the youngest, left with no one to look up to you.
My cries when you hid my books in high places wouldn’t have made you smile
The memory of a pool of blood on the floor wouldn’t come to you
And there would be no thumb with a scar on it
If I had not been in your life, your childhood would have been boring.
If I was not in your life now
Clemson football on satellite would be something you’d have to pay for
The big Chattooga Rapids would be only a sight rather than a ride
No need to offer to carry something up the trail at the end of the river day
You would anyway, but for someone who would let you.
If I wasn’t planning on being an old woman when I die
You wouldn’t worry about me being hard on your boys when they get to my school
You wouldn’t see my brown hair turn gray while your brown hair falls out
You wouldn’t have me to hug when our parents leave us behind
Having me holding on to you to make sure you didn’t slip away with them.
You told me once when we were kids that you wish I had never been born,
Your bratty little sister who still can’t keep her mouth shut
In time to stop her thoughts from falling out
But if I had never been born, you would have never known the difference
And you’d have been the youngest, left with no one to look up to you.
Needing New Bookshelves (memoir)
A snapshot of my dad then: a tall and thin middle aged man, balding from the forehead and standing in the doorway of my bedroom, holding out a thin book to me, dark brown eyes crinkled in a smile of satisfaction: Well, I told the man in the store about you, how old you are and what all you like and he said this book would be good for you. A snapshot of me then: sixteen, stretched out on my bed, open book by my side, music playing softly in the background, dark brown eyes crinkled in a smile of relief: Thanks, I’m really glad you’re home.
But the book…I wasn’t even sure that my dad knew exactly how old I was at the time, and I was absolutely sure that he had no idea what I liked. My dad, though, whose reading repertoire was limited to one book, THE book which was so often the source of our Sunday morning arguments, had struggled with the task of what to bring his only daughter, from this, his only out-of-town business trip. Knowing it needed to be a book was the easy part; figuring out what book it should be was the hard part, so he did what any responsible dad would do: he asked the first book store salesman he could find. Not a bad strategy, one would think, unless one knows that most mall book store salesmen could just as aptly sell shoes or cars or electric massaging office chairs. This bookstore salesman had filled my dad’s hands with Nancy Drew and the Secret of Shadow Ranch, for the little girl he had described.
I was no longer that little girl, but I read it because he brought it to me. I covered whatever handbook of mischief (The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test), rebellion (The Scarlet Letter), or waywardness (On the Road) was on the top of the bedside stack and placed old Nancy Drew right up there. I read it in one night, cover to cover, and I remember it to this day: the story of a mysterious phantom stallion terrorizing a pay-to-play western ranch and scaring everybody outta their city slicker minds, until our girl Nancy has the smarts to find the silver glitter paint and the guts to track that bad equine down to its even worse owner, eventually busting him and taming that fierce beast into a model of temperament and conformation. This was true old school Nancy Drew, not the savvy Mustang driver but the pre-boyfriend version of the sleuth. I was right, my dad knew neither my age nor my interests; my reading maturity had skipped right over Drew, and the love he wanted me to have for horses broke right along with my arm when I fell off of our mare at eleven years old. I appreciated the sentiment as I read his inscription in the cover, but my sixteen year old self was convinced, my daddy was holding on to a girl I had never and would never be.
I was wrong about that though; his book selection ended up fitting me more than I would have imagined then. My disgruntled teenage heart grew out of itself, and a sense of adventure like Nancy embodied meshed with my maturing self. I came to find my own kind of Deliverance on the Chattooga River and continue to learn valuable lessons from the adventures I have there still. The love of horses my dad always envisioned me having also became a reality. Although I never will be The Horse Whisperer, I find peace in the company of those gentle, intelligent, and wise animals. I won’t pretend that his buying me that book was some meaningful way to tell me he knew what I was deep down; he didn’t, and he wouldn’t have pretended to, but he made a gesture beyond what he wanted for me and gave me something he thought I would want for myself.
That sentiment, embodied in a copy of Nancy Drew and the Secret of Shadow Ranch, is the kernel of my relationship with my dad: he always wants what is best for me regardless of what he wants for himself. When I think over the small gifts he’s given me-a pack of peanut M&Ms hidden in my book bag in high school, a twenty dollar bill tucked into my car console in college, or a sticky note of encouragement posted on my steering wheel the day I moved to Virginia-I realize the large gifts that make me a happy and productive adult, and one Nancy Drew book is a small brick of that foundation. I have a whole bookshelf of small bricks that have added to that foundation, and, although my dad didn’t give me all those books, he did build that bookshelf from the remnants of a crate he came across at work before I was ever born. Together, that bookshelf and I grew up. As the shelves filled, my mind filled.
My dad giving me that book became more than a symbol of my childhood; it became a staple of my adult life. The calm and peace I feel when I spend time with my dad is rivaled only by the similar feelings I have when I read. With my dad, I am able to talk about my concerns and he always calms my worried and confused mind. He’s a constant friend that I trust and depend on unconditionally. With my books, I am able to immerse myself in a different world, full of ideas and experiences that help me escape my worried and confused mind. Reading is the unconditional friend that satisfies my questions and curiosities. Although each accomplishes it in different ways, both are able to give me relief from a tumble of disconnected thoughts. Tonight, as quiet music trickles into my ear and the warmth of home envelopes me, I fall into a world of words that holds the same safety and warmth that the little girl in my heart finds when she hugs her daddy.
A snapshot of my dad now: an older tall and thin man, balding from the forehead, standing in the doorway of my house, dark brown eyes crinkling with pride for his grown up daughter. When I get more retired, we’ll build you more bookshelves together. A snapshot of me now: twenty-eight, stretching out to hug him goodbye, dark brown eyes crinkling with gratitude. Great, I have a big stack of books that can fill it.
But the book…I wasn’t even sure that my dad knew exactly how old I was at the time, and I was absolutely sure that he had no idea what I liked. My dad, though, whose reading repertoire was limited to one book, THE book which was so often the source of our Sunday morning arguments, had struggled with the task of what to bring his only daughter, from this, his only out-of-town business trip. Knowing it needed to be a book was the easy part; figuring out what book it should be was the hard part, so he did what any responsible dad would do: he asked the first book store salesman he could find. Not a bad strategy, one would think, unless one knows that most mall book store salesmen could just as aptly sell shoes or cars or electric massaging office chairs. This bookstore salesman had filled my dad’s hands with Nancy Drew and the Secret of Shadow Ranch, for the little girl he had described.
I was no longer that little girl, but I read it because he brought it to me. I covered whatever handbook of mischief (The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test), rebellion (The Scarlet Letter), or waywardness (On the Road) was on the top of the bedside stack and placed old Nancy Drew right up there. I read it in one night, cover to cover, and I remember it to this day: the story of a mysterious phantom stallion terrorizing a pay-to-play western ranch and scaring everybody outta their city slicker minds, until our girl Nancy has the smarts to find the silver glitter paint and the guts to track that bad equine down to its even worse owner, eventually busting him and taming that fierce beast into a model of temperament and conformation. This was true old school Nancy Drew, not the savvy Mustang driver but the pre-boyfriend version of the sleuth. I was right, my dad knew neither my age nor my interests; my reading maturity had skipped right over Drew, and the love he wanted me to have for horses broke right along with my arm when I fell off of our mare at eleven years old. I appreciated the sentiment as I read his inscription in the cover, but my sixteen year old self was convinced, my daddy was holding on to a girl I had never and would never be.
I was wrong about that though; his book selection ended up fitting me more than I would have imagined then. My disgruntled teenage heart grew out of itself, and a sense of adventure like Nancy embodied meshed with my maturing self. I came to find my own kind of Deliverance on the Chattooga River and continue to learn valuable lessons from the adventures I have there still. The love of horses my dad always envisioned me having also became a reality. Although I never will be The Horse Whisperer, I find peace in the company of those gentle, intelligent, and wise animals. I won’t pretend that his buying me that book was some meaningful way to tell me he knew what I was deep down; he didn’t, and he wouldn’t have pretended to, but he made a gesture beyond what he wanted for me and gave me something he thought I would want for myself.
That sentiment, embodied in a copy of Nancy Drew and the Secret of Shadow Ranch, is the kernel of my relationship with my dad: he always wants what is best for me regardless of what he wants for himself. When I think over the small gifts he’s given me-a pack of peanut M&Ms hidden in my book bag in high school, a twenty dollar bill tucked into my car console in college, or a sticky note of encouragement posted on my steering wheel the day I moved to Virginia-I realize the large gifts that make me a happy and productive adult, and one Nancy Drew book is a small brick of that foundation. I have a whole bookshelf of small bricks that have added to that foundation, and, although my dad didn’t give me all those books, he did build that bookshelf from the remnants of a crate he came across at work before I was ever born. Together, that bookshelf and I grew up. As the shelves filled, my mind filled.
My dad giving me that book became more than a symbol of my childhood; it became a staple of my adult life. The calm and peace I feel when I spend time with my dad is rivaled only by the similar feelings I have when I read. With my dad, I am able to talk about my concerns and he always calms my worried and confused mind. He’s a constant friend that I trust and depend on unconditionally. With my books, I am able to immerse myself in a different world, full of ideas and experiences that help me escape my worried and confused mind. Reading is the unconditional friend that satisfies my questions and curiosities. Although each accomplishes it in different ways, both are able to give me relief from a tumble of disconnected thoughts. Tonight, as quiet music trickles into my ear and the warmth of home envelopes me, I fall into a world of words that holds the same safety and warmth that the little girl in my heart finds when she hugs her daddy.
A snapshot of my dad now: an older tall and thin man, balding from the forehead, standing in the doorway of my house, dark brown eyes crinkling with pride for his grown up daughter. When I get more retired, we’ll build you more bookshelves together. A snapshot of me now: twenty-eight, stretching out to hug him goodbye, dark brown eyes crinkling with gratitude. Great, I have a big stack of books that can fill it.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
UWP Reflection
Reflection
Natalia B. Simmons
Going into this program, my focus was on becoming a better teacher of writing, and I feel that I have accomplished that goal. I liked the idea that teachers of writing should be writers, but I didn’t see the necessity that was stressed to me at first. After participating in this program, I do think it is necessary, and I think I have grown as a writer through this class.
Part One: Thinking and Writing
Part Two: Process of Revision
I combined these two parts because it is easier for me to discuss a piece as having a life, and since the writing process embodies all thinking, writing, and revising, it seems redundant to split them into separate parts.
As a prose reader (mostly fiction), my writing has always been in that focus, and that is where I feel the most comfortable. However, I have worked with several poems over the course of the last several weeks that have been enlightening for me. The poem I chose to post as my poetry piece was ignited on our field trip to the South Carolina Botanical Gardens. My husband and I used to spend a lot of time there during college at Clemson, but we haven’t been there in years. Walking the paths and visiting our old places brought back a strong memory of learning whitewater dynamics on a “model” scale by floating foam kayaks through the little creeks in the garden. Jonathan was the expert, and he would explain all the nuances to me then. Since, we’ve grown up; I’m as apt on the river as him now, and our trips to the garden are no longer necessary to spend time together.
The poem began as a prose rant at our morning journaling session. I just jotted out the memory and how I have seen our relationship change in the past few years. Then, I took that prose and lined it into more of a structure of lines and stanzas. Thinking of Ron Rash’s advice and the simplicity and concision of Sandburg’s poetry, I felt bogged down in the completeness of the sentences that made up the poem in the first posted draft. I went through and removed everything I felt was unnecessary to the overall message of the poem and that became my final draft. I am pleased with the final outcome, and I doubt I will revise it further.
I intended for the open piece to be a short story I have been working on for a while, but then the blue dress came into my life with a force I could not ignore. Our downtown walk led me to a vintage clothing store, and I could just feel the history in the clothes there. I perused the racks and ran across this polyester, baby blue dress. I tried it on, mostly for fun, but I was taken away by an idea that a woman had owned this dress at some point. She had walked into a store and bought it brand new, and I wondered how it made her feel. I sat down and drafted out a very rough, sporadic idea of what the woman was and what the dress did for her. Then I thought about how it was affecting me, especially in light of what I imagined as its history. Where would I wear it? In light of the liberation theme I was following with it, I remembered a wedding that is coming up and how the newly wed bride would change as her marriage settles down. I think this poem catalogues how all women feel once their marriages fall into the daily routine that becomes a bit mundane. The subject matter of the poem is a little racy, and my mother responded that perhaps I should analyze my own life for why I would write a poem such as this. I went out of my comfort zone to create a poem with somewhat erotic themes and tones, but I don’t think the poem would have been so engaging without that included.
I posted a draft on the E-Anthology that wasn’t exactly the first draft, but the first polished draft. Wendy Warren responded that the beginning of the poem was not as engaging as the last stanzas, and, on her advice, I revised the poem by rearranging the stanzas a little to make the speaker the center of attention. Rebecca Kaminski also responded that she liked the poem but wondered more about the woman from the past. I considered adding a stanza about her, but I didn’t. I wanted the speaker to remain the focus and the woman to be more of a mystery since the history of the dress was a mystery to the speaker. I think rearranging the stanzas took care of that, though. After such an eye-opening experience in that dressing room, of course I bought the dress, and a picture of it is viewable on my blog page.
Like Ron Rash explained to us, an image sparked the idea for the fiction piece. Laurie McCall’s teaching demonstration included a picture (viewable in part on my blog page) of a young man and woman on a city street at night, separated by a few feet. The man holds a guitar, but doesn’t play, and the woman is just looking at him. I felt tension between them when I looked at the picture, and I wanted to know why. I also wondered why he wasn’t playing the guitar, but why weren’t they talking? What had gone on between these two people that made them so distant? I started out with a generic third person situation that explained some of these questions. Working from a character analysis I had been developing, I made the woman into someone who is smart and in control but has deep insecurities. I didn’t know what to do with the man, but, working from the personality of a musician friend, I roughly worked him out in the image I had of someone who is talented and focused on music as his first priority. At the end of that first draft, I determined that they had been in a relationship, but it had ended because the woman could not get comfortable with the man’s natural reticence and focus on the music.
I knew the first draft was vague, so I sent it out onto the E-Anthology for comments. Vicki Moriarty suggested that I develop the characters more, so I went back into the male’s character and tried to show an explanation of how deeply he is affected by his music. I used a character development journaling session led by Kris Turner to work his character out a little more. Women come and go in his life in a steady stream, and he sees them as a necessary evil. He’s confident and talented, and he manipulates his emotions in order to create, no matter how genuine those emotions really are. This led to the creation itself: the music. Why was he just standing there instead of playing the guitar? This led to more questions that needed answers. Why did he want to hide it from her? What could he do to get rid of her? How did he really feel? I used this character analysis to work out these answers.
Now that I feel this scene is fairly complete, it sits out there alone, and I think as I look at it that the character I want to follow out of it is the woman, perhaps because I identify with her more. The man, to me, is fairly summed up. He is set in this life, and he’s fairly flat. She has changes she needs to experience, and he’s been an experience that will help her become a stronger and more confident person. One day this little scene will be part of a short story or a novel, but, as it is, I am pleased with it. I will revise it as necessary for what ever it becomes.
Originally, my professional piece was the conference proposal for SCCTE. I revised the abstract I wrote for UWP by explaining the demonstration in more detail. Although I am pleased with the piece for the proposal, I wanted to discuss my demonstration’s strategy on a more professional level. After the journaling session on Tuesday with Dawn Hawkins, I decided to write more of an article like Jaime Lovello’s that would integrate all my work into a more comprehensive piece. To do this, I split the article into sections based on the research I used in my demonstration and explained the rationale for my classroom practices based on that research. I used the template from Rebecca Kaminski’s journal session to set up the problem I had in my class, the hypothesis I created along with the strategy, and the process I used to test it. I also explained the conclusions I drew from the completion of the strategy and ways it could be extended in my language arts classroom, as well as in other content areas. I hope to publish this article for high school teachers in a professional journal. I will revise it further as I continue to use the strategy, revise and present my demonstration, and adapt the strategy to other activities.
Part Three: Learning From Classmates
Through the first part of this reflection, I have addressed the community of writers and how they have helped me in many ways. Laurie’s demonstration gave me a great image for my fiction piece. Dawn’s and Rebecca’s journaling sessions helped me create a professional article, and Kris’s journaling session on character development helped me revise the fiction piece to add more depth to Tyler. I have also really enjoyed reading everyone’s work. Angela Kiker’s “Flatulents” made me literally laugh out loud, and Cathy Alden’s “Scream” let me know I am not alone in writing (ahem) “freedom” literature. Laurie McCall’s “Brothers” reminded me of my own brothers and how true and deep the love of family is. Reading her version of it after hearing her tell us this same story on our ride to class was interesting too; Laurie’s voice in her writing is as real and genuine as her regular voice.
In both our large group settings and our smaller writing groups, I have been amazed and encouraged by the support and the tight community we have built so quickly. At first, we were all so timid to share what we’d written, and now we openly discuss not only what we’ve written, but also the other things going on in our lives. We’re all waiting for Angela’s baby and worried about Jaime’s back pain and wondering how Monica is doing. We learned a lot about writing from one another, but I also think we learned a lot about life and how different people experience it. This has truly been an enlightening and enjoyable experience for me.
Natalia B. Simmons
Going into this program, my focus was on becoming a better teacher of writing, and I feel that I have accomplished that goal. I liked the idea that teachers of writing should be writers, but I didn’t see the necessity that was stressed to me at first. After participating in this program, I do think it is necessary, and I think I have grown as a writer through this class.
Part One: Thinking and Writing
Part Two: Process of Revision
I combined these two parts because it is easier for me to discuss a piece as having a life, and since the writing process embodies all thinking, writing, and revising, it seems redundant to split them into separate parts.
As a prose reader (mostly fiction), my writing has always been in that focus, and that is where I feel the most comfortable. However, I have worked with several poems over the course of the last several weeks that have been enlightening for me. The poem I chose to post as my poetry piece was ignited on our field trip to the South Carolina Botanical Gardens. My husband and I used to spend a lot of time there during college at Clemson, but we haven’t been there in years. Walking the paths and visiting our old places brought back a strong memory of learning whitewater dynamics on a “model” scale by floating foam kayaks through the little creeks in the garden. Jonathan was the expert, and he would explain all the nuances to me then. Since, we’ve grown up; I’m as apt on the river as him now, and our trips to the garden are no longer necessary to spend time together.
The poem began as a prose rant at our morning journaling session. I just jotted out the memory and how I have seen our relationship change in the past few years. Then, I took that prose and lined it into more of a structure of lines and stanzas. Thinking of Ron Rash’s advice and the simplicity and concision of Sandburg’s poetry, I felt bogged down in the completeness of the sentences that made up the poem in the first posted draft. I went through and removed everything I felt was unnecessary to the overall message of the poem and that became my final draft. I am pleased with the final outcome, and I doubt I will revise it further.
I intended for the open piece to be a short story I have been working on for a while, but then the blue dress came into my life with a force I could not ignore. Our downtown walk led me to a vintage clothing store, and I could just feel the history in the clothes there. I perused the racks and ran across this polyester, baby blue dress. I tried it on, mostly for fun, but I was taken away by an idea that a woman had owned this dress at some point. She had walked into a store and bought it brand new, and I wondered how it made her feel. I sat down and drafted out a very rough, sporadic idea of what the woman was and what the dress did for her. Then I thought about how it was affecting me, especially in light of what I imagined as its history. Where would I wear it? In light of the liberation theme I was following with it, I remembered a wedding that is coming up and how the newly wed bride would change as her marriage settles down. I think this poem catalogues how all women feel once their marriages fall into the daily routine that becomes a bit mundane. The subject matter of the poem is a little racy, and my mother responded that perhaps I should analyze my own life for why I would write a poem such as this. I went out of my comfort zone to create a poem with somewhat erotic themes and tones, but I don’t think the poem would have been so engaging without that included.
I posted a draft on the E-Anthology that wasn’t exactly the first draft, but the first polished draft. Wendy Warren responded that the beginning of the poem was not as engaging as the last stanzas, and, on her advice, I revised the poem by rearranging the stanzas a little to make the speaker the center of attention. Rebecca Kaminski also responded that she liked the poem but wondered more about the woman from the past. I considered adding a stanza about her, but I didn’t. I wanted the speaker to remain the focus and the woman to be more of a mystery since the history of the dress was a mystery to the speaker. I think rearranging the stanzas took care of that, though. After such an eye-opening experience in that dressing room, of course I bought the dress, and a picture of it is viewable on my blog page.
Like Ron Rash explained to us, an image sparked the idea for the fiction piece. Laurie McCall’s teaching demonstration included a picture (viewable in part on my blog page) of a young man and woman on a city street at night, separated by a few feet. The man holds a guitar, but doesn’t play, and the woman is just looking at him. I felt tension between them when I looked at the picture, and I wanted to know why. I also wondered why he wasn’t playing the guitar, but why weren’t they talking? What had gone on between these two people that made them so distant? I started out with a generic third person situation that explained some of these questions. Working from a character analysis I had been developing, I made the woman into someone who is smart and in control but has deep insecurities. I didn’t know what to do with the man, but, working from the personality of a musician friend, I roughly worked him out in the image I had of someone who is talented and focused on music as his first priority. At the end of that first draft, I determined that they had been in a relationship, but it had ended because the woman could not get comfortable with the man’s natural reticence and focus on the music.
I knew the first draft was vague, so I sent it out onto the E-Anthology for comments. Vicki Moriarty suggested that I develop the characters more, so I went back into the male’s character and tried to show an explanation of how deeply he is affected by his music. I used a character development journaling session led by Kris Turner to work his character out a little more. Women come and go in his life in a steady stream, and he sees them as a necessary evil. He’s confident and talented, and he manipulates his emotions in order to create, no matter how genuine those emotions really are. This led to the creation itself: the music. Why was he just standing there instead of playing the guitar? This led to more questions that needed answers. Why did he want to hide it from her? What could he do to get rid of her? How did he really feel? I used this character analysis to work out these answers.
Now that I feel this scene is fairly complete, it sits out there alone, and I think as I look at it that the character I want to follow out of it is the woman, perhaps because I identify with her more. The man, to me, is fairly summed up. He is set in this life, and he’s fairly flat. She has changes she needs to experience, and he’s been an experience that will help her become a stronger and more confident person. One day this little scene will be part of a short story or a novel, but, as it is, I am pleased with it. I will revise it as necessary for what ever it becomes.
Originally, my professional piece was the conference proposal for SCCTE. I revised the abstract I wrote for UWP by explaining the demonstration in more detail. Although I am pleased with the piece for the proposal, I wanted to discuss my demonstration’s strategy on a more professional level. After the journaling session on Tuesday with Dawn Hawkins, I decided to write more of an article like Jaime Lovello’s that would integrate all my work into a more comprehensive piece. To do this, I split the article into sections based on the research I used in my demonstration and explained the rationale for my classroom practices based on that research. I used the template from Rebecca Kaminski’s journal session to set up the problem I had in my class, the hypothesis I created along with the strategy, and the process I used to test it. I also explained the conclusions I drew from the completion of the strategy and ways it could be extended in my language arts classroom, as well as in other content areas. I hope to publish this article for high school teachers in a professional journal. I will revise it further as I continue to use the strategy, revise and present my demonstration, and adapt the strategy to other activities.
Part Three: Learning From Classmates
Through the first part of this reflection, I have addressed the community of writers and how they have helped me in many ways. Laurie’s demonstration gave me a great image for my fiction piece. Dawn’s and Rebecca’s journaling sessions helped me create a professional article, and Kris’s journaling session on character development helped me revise the fiction piece to add more depth to Tyler. I have also really enjoyed reading everyone’s work. Angela Kiker’s “Flatulents” made me literally laugh out loud, and Cathy Alden’s “Scream” let me know I am not alone in writing (ahem) “freedom” literature. Laurie McCall’s “Brothers” reminded me of my own brothers and how true and deep the love of family is. Reading her version of it after hearing her tell us this same story on our ride to class was interesting too; Laurie’s voice in her writing is as real and genuine as her regular voice.
In both our large group settings and our smaller writing groups, I have been amazed and encouraged by the support and the tight community we have built so quickly. At first, we were all so timid to share what we’d written, and now we openly discuss not only what we’ve written, but also the other things going on in our lives. We’re all waiting for Angela’s baby and worried about Jaime’s back pain and wondering how Monica is doing. We learned a lot about writing from one another, but I also think we learned a lot about life and how different people experience it. This has truly been an enlightening and enjoyable experience for me.
What Do You Know "How To" Do? (Professional Piece, Final Draft)
Natalia Simmons
What do you know “How To” do?
Using “How To” articles to explore reading and writing in the secondary classroom
Introduction
Do you want to know “How To” do something new? Where do you go to find out? From growing broccoli to whitewater kayaking, most people love to learn new things, and adults use many resources to find answers to the questions we have. By using the format of a “How To” article, students can take essential elements of lessons from all content areas and incorporate informational writing to create a unique and powerful learning tool. Haven’t you ever wondered “How To…” Bowl with a Lilliputian? Earn the Right to Vote? Deliver a Powerful Speech? Multiply Fractions? Using the process outlined here, students will be able to deconstruct the finer details of lessons to better understand the essential message. The lesson featured in this explanation is based in an English Two honors class with Gulliver’s Travels, where the class collaboratively analyzed the “How To” genre through various samples. The basis of their “How To” creations is a reader generated question from the first book of the novel. This article explains the lesson process and provides the research basis for both the reading and writing aspects of the strategy.
Instructional Problem
In my English Two honors class, I found that students read and question what they have read, but they do not explore the answers on a deeper level on their own, relying on our class discussions and lectures to satisfy that need. They also have a hard time extending the themes and ideas of what they read in fiction to nonfiction texts. Missing this connection makes it hard for them to make connections between writing nonfiction for academic purposes and fiction reading for the class. I wanted them to make inferences from their reading to create a real world response.
Hypothesis
Upon starting a unit on Gulliver’s Travels, I wanted to see how we could use nonfiction models to make inferences from what we’ve read in the novel. On top of this, I wanted to give them ownership of the novel by having them write their own questions as they read rather than answering teacher-generated questions. It is important to stress to students that the questions they write should be genuine; some questions may be answered later in the text, but generally the questions will require the help of other people or sources. I decided that they would be more engaged in finding an answer to a question they had created themselves. This also supports real world literacy because students are able to identify what they know and do not know, then evaluate that question to determine the best way to find an answer. They are then able to apply this process to what they question in everyday life.
Research Findings and Connections
Chris Tovani, I Read it but I Don’t Get It
“Readers who are taught to question the text can infer and clear up confusion better than those who simply decode the words and accept ideas unchallenged.”
“In the real world, the learner, the one wanting information, initiates the questions…When one question is answered, usually another one arises. The more I learn, the more sophisticated my questions become. Through questioning, I gain new information and I am better able to apply what I have learned.”
To facilitate this portion, I walked students through an active reading strategy in questioning their reading materials. As they read in class and for homework, they wrote the questions that came to them on Post-It notes and placed them in the book where the question was posed. In class, we created a chart with four boxes labeled From the Text, Requires an Outside Source, Ponderable, and Open Category. Each box represented where the student thought he or she should go for the answer to the question they needed addressed the most. Students posted their questions on the chart accordingly as they entered class throughout the unit.
At this point, questions were addressed in a variety of ways. Initially, we looked at the questions and answered them as a group just to get us started in the book. I’ve explained this step because it is important to the main point, creating the “How To” article; however, we addressed the questions in several ways: class discussion, text hunting, jigsaw researching, peer sharing, etc. Creating the “How To” article is just one example of how we addressed the questions.
Step One
On the “How To” day, students posted their questions as they had been. Then I grouped the class into pairs, and each pair chose one classmate’s question from the chart. Together, the pair discussed the question they chose and recorded a response to that question. They were able to use their text, the internet, nonfiction books, and one another to answer these questions. Then we set the question and answer pair aside momentarily.
Nancy Sommers, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”
“I use the terms student writers and experienced writers because the principal difference between these two groups is the amount of experience they have had in writing.”
When it came to using the questions to bridge to nonfiction texts, this piece of research became the basis of my idea. Students have little experience with writing and the literature they are writing about, so making it relevant to their lives is an important aspect of the secondary class. In addition to this, contemporary society is highly visual and reactionary, and I knew I needed to use it to my advantage. I could use several texts by “experienced writers” for students to work from, but I wanted something highly engaging, simply constructed, and familiar. As I looked for short genres to satisfy these needs, I found the “How To” article format to be the most intriguing. My students are at an age where they look for solutions to their problems and they want to know how to do new things, and the format was familiar because they see these types of articles in different kinds of magazines and on the internet. I knew I would be able to find a variety of examples that would relate to their interests to use for classroom models.
Step Two, Part One
Each pair of students received an example of a “How To” article pulled from various magazines I had available. After reading the article together, the pair completed several analysis tasks. They identified the audience of the article and determined the final product that should result from the article. They then made a list of characteristics of their particular article, as well as listed information the article left out that they felt was necessary for successful completion. We went around the room and discussed these characteristics and compared and contrasted the format and effectiveness of the different articles. We made a list of these on the board for all the class to have available.
Rebecca Bowers Sipe, Tracy Rosewarne, Purposeful Writing
“Investigation into the conventions of a genre also provides the opportunity for students to contextualize their understanding of the various skills and craft lessons…each represents an area of identified need and each will be immediately reinforced in their writing.”
This piece of research guided me in connecting the fiction reading (Gulliver’s Travels) to the nonfiction article. They were familiar at this point with the tone, purpose, and audience of the “How To” genre. It was time for them to create their own version based on the reading and questioning they had done. I considered giving the students a rubric of what needed to be in the “How To” they would create, but after looking at the models we would use, I realized these were all different. Students needed the opportunity to address the question they had chosen in a format that was appropriate for their answer, and these too would all be different.
Step Two, Part Two
Students were asked to revise the answers they recorded to the Gulliver’s Travels question they chose. Once they were satisfied with their answers, they brainstormed ways to create a “How To” article from the question and answer they received. This required them to make inferences about what they read and pose it in an answer that fit the “How To” models they analyzed. After they brainstormed their ideas, I gave each pair a large piece of white paper (11.5x17) on which to draw out their “How To” article. The only guidelines they had in the creation was to use the characteristics they identified from the models and that their “How To” had to provide an answer to the question they chose.
Conclusion
Using this method, students were able to extend their real world experiences into their academic study through writing. They were able to analyze a familiar subgenre of nonfiction, and they were able to use that model to write their own examples, which was an unfamiliar task. Most groups answered the question directly in articles such as, “How to Negotiate with Hostile Little People.” Some groups were more creative in their answers and products. For example, in response to the question, “If Gulliver is so much larger than the Lilliputians, why doesn’t he just do what he wants?” a group created a “How to Bowl with Lilliputians” article. It guides its reader through a process that uses Lilliputians as bowling balls and bowling pins to Gulliver’s game. Student products also included a mixture of texts and pictures to support the text. Using this mixture gave them the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding in two ways.
Extensions
After using this process for a reading based activity, I determined it would also be useful to use in analyzing students’ own writing. They could identify flaws and weaknesses in their writing, research solutions, and create a self-help “How To” to use as a guide for writing and revising. In other content areas, a similar principle applies. Students could create a variety of articles for different subjects, such as “How To…” Earn the Right to Vote? Deliver a Powerful Speech? Multiply Fractions? In addition to these ideas, I also have considered extending the product into something more professional by completing a final draft on a publishing program with photographs and text. With more time, students can complete a variety of nonfiction modeled products and compile them into a magazine, with the “How To” article as one piece of the whole.
Research
Sipe, Rebecca Bowers and Tracy Rosewarne. Purposeful Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
2006
Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. Ed. Victor Villanova, Jr. Urbana, Il: NCTE, 1997. 43-54.
Tovani, Chris. I Read It, But I Don’t Get It. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2000.
What do you know “How To” do?
Using “How To” articles to explore reading and writing in the secondary classroom
Introduction
Do you want to know “How To” do something new? Where do you go to find out? From growing broccoli to whitewater kayaking, most people love to learn new things, and adults use many resources to find answers to the questions we have. By using the format of a “How To” article, students can take essential elements of lessons from all content areas and incorporate informational writing to create a unique and powerful learning tool. Haven’t you ever wondered “How To…” Bowl with a Lilliputian? Earn the Right to Vote? Deliver a Powerful Speech? Multiply Fractions? Using the process outlined here, students will be able to deconstruct the finer details of lessons to better understand the essential message. The lesson featured in this explanation is based in an English Two honors class with Gulliver’s Travels, where the class collaboratively analyzed the “How To” genre through various samples. The basis of their “How To” creations is a reader generated question from the first book of the novel. This article explains the lesson process and provides the research basis for both the reading and writing aspects of the strategy.
Instructional Problem
In my English Two honors class, I found that students read and question what they have read, but they do not explore the answers on a deeper level on their own, relying on our class discussions and lectures to satisfy that need. They also have a hard time extending the themes and ideas of what they read in fiction to nonfiction texts. Missing this connection makes it hard for them to make connections between writing nonfiction for academic purposes and fiction reading for the class. I wanted them to make inferences from their reading to create a real world response.
Hypothesis
Upon starting a unit on Gulliver’s Travels, I wanted to see how we could use nonfiction models to make inferences from what we’ve read in the novel. On top of this, I wanted to give them ownership of the novel by having them write their own questions as they read rather than answering teacher-generated questions. It is important to stress to students that the questions they write should be genuine; some questions may be answered later in the text, but generally the questions will require the help of other people or sources. I decided that they would be more engaged in finding an answer to a question they had created themselves. This also supports real world literacy because students are able to identify what they know and do not know, then evaluate that question to determine the best way to find an answer. They are then able to apply this process to what they question in everyday life.
Research Findings and Connections
Chris Tovani, I Read it but I Don’t Get It
“Readers who are taught to question the text can infer and clear up confusion better than those who simply decode the words and accept ideas unchallenged.”
“In the real world, the learner, the one wanting information, initiates the questions…When one question is answered, usually another one arises. The more I learn, the more sophisticated my questions become. Through questioning, I gain new information and I am better able to apply what I have learned.”
To facilitate this portion, I walked students through an active reading strategy in questioning their reading materials. As they read in class and for homework, they wrote the questions that came to them on Post-It notes and placed them in the book where the question was posed. In class, we created a chart with four boxes labeled From the Text, Requires an Outside Source, Ponderable, and Open Category. Each box represented where the student thought he or she should go for the answer to the question they needed addressed the most. Students posted their questions on the chart accordingly as they entered class throughout the unit.
At this point, questions were addressed in a variety of ways. Initially, we looked at the questions and answered them as a group just to get us started in the book. I’ve explained this step because it is important to the main point, creating the “How To” article; however, we addressed the questions in several ways: class discussion, text hunting, jigsaw researching, peer sharing, etc. Creating the “How To” article is just one example of how we addressed the questions.
Step One
On the “How To” day, students posted their questions as they had been. Then I grouped the class into pairs, and each pair chose one classmate’s question from the chart. Together, the pair discussed the question they chose and recorded a response to that question. They were able to use their text, the internet, nonfiction books, and one another to answer these questions. Then we set the question and answer pair aside momentarily.
Nancy Sommers, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”
“I use the terms student writers and experienced writers because the principal difference between these two groups is the amount of experience they have had in writing.”
When it came to using the questions to bridge to nonfiction texts, this piece of research became the basis of my idea. Students have little experience with writing and the literature they are writing about, so making it relevant to their lives is an important aspect of the secondary class. In addition to this, contemporary society is highly visual and reactionary, and I knew I needed to use it to my advantage. I could use several texts by “experienced writers” for students to work from, but I wanted something highly engaging, simply constructed, and familiar. As I looked for short genres to satisfy these needs, I found the “How To” article format to be the most intriguing. My students are at an age where they look for solutions to their problems and they want to know how to do new things, and the format was familiar because they see these types of articles in different kinds of magazines and on the internet. I knew I would be able to find a variety of examples that would relate to their interests to use for classroom models.
Step Two, Part One
Each pair of students received an example of a “How To” article pulled from various magazines I had available. After reading the article together, the pair completed several analysis tasks. They identified the audience of the article and determined the final product that should result from the article. They then made a list of characteristics of their particular article, as well as listed information the article left out that they felt was necessary for successful completion. We went around the room and discussed these characteristics and compared and contrasted the format and effectiveness of the different articles. We made a list of these on the board for all the class to have available.
Rebecca Bowers Sipe, Tracy Rosewarne, Purposeful Writing
“Investigation into the conventions of a genre also provides the opportunity for students to contextualize their understanding of the various skills and craft lessons…each represents an area of identified need and each will be immediately reinforced in their writing.”
This piece of research guided me in connecting the fiction reading (Gulliver’s Travels) to the nonfiction article. They were familiar at this point with the tone, purpose, and audience of the “How To” genre. It was time for them to create their own version based on the reading and questioning they had done. I considered giving the students a rubric of what needed to be in the “How To” they would create, but after looking at the models we would use, I realized these were all different. Students needed the opportunity to address the question they had chosen in a format that was appropriate for their answer, and these too would all be different.
Step Two, Part Two
Students were asked to revise the answers they recorded to the Gulliver’s Travels question they chose. Once they were satisfied with their answers, they brainstormed ways to create a “How To” article from the question and answer they received. This required them to make inferences about what they read and pose it in an answer that fit the “How To” models they analyzed. After they brainstormed their ideas, I gave each pair a large piece of white paper (11.5x17) on which to draw out their “How To” article. The only guidelines they had in the creation was to use the characteristics they identified from the models and that their “How To” had to provide an answer to the question they chose.
Conclusion
Using this method, students were able to extend their real world experiences into their academic study through writing. They were able to analyze a familiar subgenre of nonfiction, and they were able to use that model to write their own examples, which was an unfamiliar task. Most groups answered the question directly in articles such as, “How to Negotiate with Hostile Little People.” Some groups were more creative in their answers and products. For example, in response to the question, “If Gulliver is so much larger than the Lilliputians, why doesn’t he just do what he wants?” a group created a “How to Bowl with Lilliputians” article. It guides its reader through a process that uses Lilliputians as bowling balls and bowling pins to Gulliver’s game. Student products also included a mixture of texts and pictures to support the text. Using this mixture gave them the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding in two ways.
Extensions
After using this process for a reading based activity, I determined it would also be useful to use in analyzing students’ own writing. They could identify flaws and weaknesses in their writing, research solutions, and create a self-help “How To” to use as a guide for writing and revising. In other content areas, a similar principle applies. Students could create a variety of articles for different subjects, such as “How To…” Earn the Right to Vote? Deliver a Powerful Speech? Multiply Fractions? In addition to these ideas, I also have considered extending the product into something more professional by completing a final draft on a publishing program with photographs and text. With more time, students can complete a variety of nonfiction modeled products and compile them into a magazine, with the “How To” article as one piece of the whole.
Research
Sipe, Rebecca Bowers and Tracy Rosewarne. Purposeful Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
2006
Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. Ed. Victor Villanova, Jr. Urbana, Il: NCTE, 1997. 43-54.
Tovani, Chris. I Read It, But I Don’t Get It. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2000.
Monday, June 25, 2007
SCCTE 2008 Proposal Description (Professional Piece, First Draft)
SCCTE 2008: Teaching and Creating South Carolina Writers
Program Proposal for Teachers
Name of Lead Presenter Natalia Simmons
Do you want to know “How To” do something new? Where do you go to find out? From growing broccoli to whitewater kayaking, most people love to learn new things, and adults use many resources to learn what we want to know. In this demonstration, teachers will learn a strategy to utilize kids’ natural curiosity by helping them create “How To” articles. By using the format of a “How To” article, students can take essential elements of lessons from all content areas and incorporate informational writing to create a unique and powerful learning tool. Haven’t you ever wondered “How To…” Bowl with a Lilliputian? Earn the Right to Vote? Deliver a Powerful Speech? Multiply Fractions? Using this process, your students will be able to deconstruct the finer details of your lessons to better understand the essential message. The lesson featured in the demonstration is based in an English 2 class with Gulliver’s Travels, where the class collaboratively analyzed the “How To” genre through various samples. The basis of their “How To” creations is a reader generated question from the first book of the novel. The demonstration walks participants through the lesson process and provides a research basis for both the reading and writing aspects of the strategy. A comprehensive handout of the process is provided, and student samples are available.
Program Proposal for Teachers
Name of Lead Presenter Natalia Simmons
Do you want to know “How To” do something new? Where do you go to find out? From growing broccoli to whitewater kayaking, most people love to learn new things, and adults use many resources to learn what we want to know. In this demonstration, teachers will learn a strategy to utilize kids’ natural curiosity by helping them create “How To” articles. By using the format of a “How To” article, students can take essential elements of lessons from all content areas and incorporate informational writing to create a unique and powerful learning tool. Haven’t you ever wondered “How To…” Bowl with a Lilliputian? Earn the Right to Vote? Deliver a Powerful Speech? Multiply Fractions? Using this process, your students will be able to deconstruct the finer details of your lessons to better understand the essential message. The lesson featured in the demonstration is based in an English 2 class with Gulliver’s Travels, where the class collaboratively analyzed the “How To” genre through various samples. The basis of their “How To” creations is a reader generated question from the first book of the novel. The demonstration walks participants through the lesson process and provides a research basis for both the reading and writing aspects of the strategy. A comprehensive handout of the process is provided, and student samples are available.
Blue Dress (Poetry, Final Draft)
In the dressing room, I slide you on.
Seventies polyester falls in a steady flow,
Slipping over curves just recently discovered.
I marvel at myself, thinking of where I could take you,
And where you could take me.
Your vintage history makes me wonder,
Who bought you new?
A young woman with brown bobbed hair
Searching for something she can’t name
But knows she’s lost?
Where have you been, blue dress?
The trace of your life has landed you
In this store, wrinkled and waiting
Among rainbows of colors, textures, styles
All from times forgotten.
I am considering you, blue dress.
Tracing the intricate lace bodice, curious
What anxious fingertips have brushed it?
Fumbling to search for a zipper but failing the attempt
Before sliding the flowing skirt up instead;
Such an easier solution.
Blue dress, might you soon relive that passionate memory
To find yourself in a soft puddle
On the floor beside my running shoes?
Remember the hands that took you off
And remind me of their desire.
How will you look on a hot August day
As I watch friends get married and think,
“You’re making a huge mistake.”
One day, she’ll see a blue dress
While she’s searching for something she’s lost.
She’ll try it on and remember how it felt
To be wanted to the point of pain.
She’ll buy that blue dress and take it home,
Tuck it in the back of the closet behind her white gown,
And wait for a blue day that deserves its attention.
Seventies polyester falls in a steady flow,
Slipping over curves just recently discovered.
I marvel at myself, thinking of where I could take you,
And where you could take me.
Your vintage history makes me wonder,
Who bought you new?
A young woman with brown bobbed hair
Searching for something she can’t name
But knows she’s lost?
Where have you been, blue dress?
The trace of your life has landed you
In this store, wrinkled and waiting
Among rainbows of colors, textures, styles
All from times forgotten.
I am considering you, blue dress.
Tracing the intricate lace bodice, curious
What anxious fingertips have brushed it?
Fumbling to search for a zipper but failing the attempt
Before sliding the flowing skirt up instead;
Such an easier solution.
Blue dress, might you soon relive that passionate memory
To find yourself in a soft puddle
On the floor beside my running shoes?
Remember the hands that took you off
And remind me of their desire.
How will you look on a hot August day
As I watch friends get married and think,
“You’re making a huge mistake.”
One day, she’ll see a blue dress
While she’s searching for something she’s lost.
She’ll try it on and remember how it felt
To be wanted to the point of pain.
She’ll buy that blue dress and take it home,
Tuck it in the back of the closet behind her white gown,
And wait for a blue day that deserves its attention.
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