A Life Examined
I've been running regularly for 18 years, but my life as a thirty-something has introduced some surprising changes to my relationship to running, which includes getting in a run when I can, even if it's only 20 minutes long, and running with headphones. And most recently, my semi-regular runs have been slowing down to walks because of my latest love for the New Yorker Fiction Podcasts Listening to stories while I run is slowing me down so that I can be sure to hear the ending before I return to my regular life outside of headphones and endorphins.
As a reading and writing teacher, I frequently self-reflect on how infrequently I actually sit down with a book in hand to read. Though I am schooled to acknowledge literacy as a broad term, surrounding us daily from the moment we exit the womb, I forget how effected we can be by something we hear, or experience when it hits us at just the right moment. In the story I listened to yesterday, Cryptology by Leanord Michaels', read aloud by Rivka Galchen, there is a part near the end when the protagonist Knockman thinks about Socrates famous statement that a life unexamined is a life unlived. "Knockman wasn't against examining his life, but then, what was a life?" In a time when we can practically teleport ourselves from one side of the country to the other within a few hours, the option to change everything is always there. For me, with a family and a life-path that binds me to a plot of land only a few hundred square feet, I find that I can both examine, and live life through sharing with others to broaden my perspective. I can also travel through time and see the world through the eyes of others in story form, which brings me to my point...
Last week when I introduced myself to my small group of kids in my new after school creative writing class, I told the kids that I'm a teacher and a writer. It was strange how phony I felt having introduced myself as a writer when one of the girls asked me if I have any books published. "Actually no." I responded, thinking to myself that I'll probably never have a book published, nor has it ever occurred to me as one of my life goals. All too often, teachers introduce writing to students by informing them that they must think about their audience, and who they are writing for. But writing isn't always about writing for anyone else but oneself. In fact, rarely do I write for anyone else at all. My writing is purely reflective and documentative, which serves my need to both live, examine and remember that which is important to me.
So for today, I'm going to bring in the many journals I've kept over the years of my life, from childhood to adulthood. I write for myself, and I want my students that that is one of the many powerful tools of writing.
Lesson Plan
Strategy Lesson: On the Page, Off the Page
In order to introduce the idea that reading can take every individual to a different place, I want to show my students a strategy for writing down ones own thinking while reading a story.
1. Fold a paper in half and title each side of the page:
On the Page and Off the Page
2. As we listen to a story read aloud by a celebrity on http://www.storylineonline.net/, I'll demonstrate the concept of writing down On the Page something of personal significance that happens in the story and then why I wrote that down/ what meaning it has for me, or what it reminds me of.
This is actually both a reading and a writing strategy, because as we go through life finding words, experiences, stories, pictures, etc. that influence or intrigue us, we file them away in our memories. Sometimes they resurface, and take on new forms and meanings and those memories, in conjunction the gift of human imagination is what writers use to create brilliant stories.
Reading is always about making meaning from the text. Good readers make meaning by drawing connections to past experiences and intriguing ideas. It seems like such a simple concept, but kids don't always know that reading and writing is something they get to do for themselves, and that is what I want my students to understand.
3. After we practice On the Page/ Off the Page
I want the students to feel a sense of valued ownership over the journals I gave them last week. So while I have one student at time listen to a story or poem read aloud on headphones, I'll have the rest of them simply decorate the covers of their journals with paper, pictures, stickers, stamps, words, etc.
Once all of the kids have listened to the poem, we'll come back together to share our On the Page/ Off the Page writings/ drawings.
For the Future
Working on Our Collaborative Zine:
Vote on a title
Think about a topic you are interested in writing on.
Some ideas:
Interviews
Fashion
Movies
Book Reviews
News
Recipes/ Food
How-to/ Tutorials
Comic Strips
Music
As a reading and writing teacher, I frequently self-reflect on how infrequently I actually sit down with a book in hand to read. Though I am schooled to acknowledge literacy as a broad term, surrounding us daily from the moment we exit the womb, I forget how effected we can be by something we hear, or experience when it hits us at just the right moment. In the story I listened to yesterday, Cryptology by Leanord Michaels', read aloud by Rivka Galchen, there is a part near the end when the protagonist Knockman thinks about Socrates famous statement that a life unexamined is a life unlived. "Knockman wasn't against examining his life, but then, what was a life?" In a time when we can practically teleport ourselves from one side of the country to the other within a few hours, the option to change everything is always there. For me, with a family and a life-path that binds me to a plot of land only a few hundred square feet, I find that I can both examine, and live life through sharing with others to broaden my perspective. I can also travel through time and see the world through the eyes of others in story form, which brings me to my point...
Last week when I introduced myself to my small group of kids in my new after school creative writing class, I told the kids that I'm a teacher and a writer. It was strange how phony I felt having introduced myself as a writer when one of the girls asked me if I have any books published. "Actually no." I responded, thinking to myself that I'll probably never have a book published, nor has it ever occurred to me as one of my life goals. All too often, teachers introduce writing to students by informing them that they must think about their audience, and who they are writing for. But writing isn't always about writing for anyone else but oneself. In fact, rarely do I write for anyone else at all. My writing is purely reflective and documentative, which serves my need to both live, examine and remember that which is important to me.
So for today, I'm going to bring in the many journals I've kept over the years of my life, from childhood to adulthood. I write for myself, and I want my students that that is one of the many powerful tools of writing.
Lesson Plan
Strategy Lesson: On the Page, Off the Page
In order to introduce the idea that reading can take every individual to a different place, I want to show my students a strategy for writing down ones own thinking while reading a story.
1. Fold a paper in half and title each side of the page:
On the Page and Off the Page
2. As we listen to a story read aloud by a celebrity on http://www.storylineonline.net/, I'll demonstrate the concept of writing down On the Page something of personal significance that happens in the story and then why I wrote that down/ what meaning it has for me, or what it reminds me of.
This is actually both a reading and a writing strategy, because as we go through life finding words, experiences, stories, pictures, etc. that influence or intrigue us, we file them away in our memories. Sometimes they resurface, and take on new forms and meanings and those memories, in conjunction the gift of human imagination is what writers use to create brilliant stories.
Reading is always about making meaning from the text. Good readers make meaning by drawing connections to past experiences and intriguing ideas. It seems like such a simple concept, but kids don't always know that reading and writing is something they get to do for themselves, and that is what I want my students to understand.
3. After we practice On the Page/ Off the Page
I want the students to feel a sense of valued ownership over the journals I gave them last week. So while I have one student at time listen to a story or poem read aloud on headphones, I'll have the rest of them simply decorate the covers of their journals with paper, pictures, stickers, stamps, words, etc.
Once all of the kids have listened to the poem, we'll come back together to share our On the Page/ Off the Page writings/ drawings.
For the Future
Working on Our Collaborative Zine:
Vote on a title
Think about a topic you are interested in writing on.
Some ideas:
Interviews
Fashion
Movies
Book Reviews
News
Recipes/ Food
How-to/ Tutorials
Comic Strips
Music
Comments
Post a Comment