January, the end of

January should be for reading.

I’ve got to write a response to Stephen King’s On Writing.  And another one on Write Beside Them, by Penny Kittle.  And one on Crafting Digital Writing, by Troy Hicks. 
Stephen King talks about what may have shaped him into being the writer he is … he wrote an autobiography of sorts and then turned toward the craft of writing and some serious and specific  advice.  He was addressing those who want to write professionally.  Write short stories, get published, shun adverbs and pronouns, listen closely to people so you can write good dialogue, cut 10% of your first draft — but only after you let it sit in your desk for a minimum of six weeks.  The six weeks gives you some distance from it.  You write the first draft quickly with the door closed.  Nobody, including writing retreat folks, ought to be in on it.  After the first draft, open the door — to those you think have useful things to say.  Write for an ideal reader.  Get an agent.  Get published.
He was not writing for the teacher, not specifically.
Kittle and Hicks do write for the teacher.  Mostly for the teacher.
I relate more to King, even though I’m not writing a novel or looking for an agent.  My personality traits align more with King.  Not the horror stuff or the alcohol, but the making of things, the need to work on projects. 
Kittle and Hicks drive the point home that teachers need to do the thing they are teaching.  They need to be writing.  Need to teach from the messy inside of the process.  Not always messy, but it’s not possible to give instruction on how to find your way through the process when you are not living the process.
It can be easy (in some ways) to teach when you are inside the writing.  You’re not guessing at what it takes to find a topic, a beginning, the structure …. you can give a travel guide, because you’ve been there.  It might sound silly but it makes me think of teaching yoga.  There are teachers who stand at the front of the room and give instructions but they don’t do any asana themselves.  Their cues are odd sometimes, like they don’t know what it would feel like in the body to do the thing that was just described.  It’s easy to tell the instructors who have a strong practice themselves.  Like the ones who just came back from spending a month in India with BKS Iyengar, 10 hours a day — studying anatomy, do asana, getting yelled at, learning … practicing practicing practicing.
Anyway, I don’t even like going to class anymore, no matter who the instructor is, but that is not about writing … maybe.

I believe in what Penny Kittle talks about — that we don’t know what these kids are living with — we must be kind and patient, and never give up on any of them.  They deserve to learn how to write well.
I strongly believe that.  Teachers must be highly organized and motivated.  Gather all of those great mentor texts.  Be on your toes to catch the next mini lesson as it is naturally presented. 
And Troy Hicks, with his passion for the technology, the composing that can be done using technology.  We need to be literate.  Verbally and visually.
Again, teachers must be doing what they are teaching.  That means creating digital stories and podcasts, blogs, wikis, websites — thoughtfully.  Crafting, not just randomly posting. 
Teach from the inside here too, which can be more challenging for some of us who are not digital natives.  Things seem to change so quickly.

I better go finish reading The Goldfinch now, even though I’ll miss Boris and Theo, Pippa and Hobie so much when the book is done.  It’s a big book.  Sometimes, I feel slightly lost in the digital world — not so much because I don’t understand it — more because the pace feels different.  I like an 800 page book, I like the quiet of it.
(I also love beautiful photos and the story/song here.)

Penny Kittle

I'm reading Write Beside Them, by Penny Kittle.  Trying to read.  I'm a little distracted by 13 year old girl drama and sadness.

"Grammar is a piano I play by ear.  All I know about grammar is its power."  --Joan Didion

I was reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem in Los Angeles thirteen years ago; I remember.  Something big hit me while I was reading that book -- life-changing big.

The skinny Polish clothes designer/manufacturer who lived next to me in L.A. has morphed with the skinny Polish chambermaid dying of cancer (with three kids) I knew when I was a teenager in Maine.
In my mind, they are the same person now.

The boy who rode his bicycle to Burger King after school has blended with the guy who lives under a truck cap in the woods.  One is alive, one is dead.  The boy on the bike ended up in the quarry.  The one under the truck cap still summers under the truck cap, I think.

Penny Kittle puts out Interest Journals for her class.  She has a great pile of journals with labels written on the covers: Driving, Sports, Parents, Friendship, Movies, Video Games, Cartoons, Snow, Hair, Sexual Harassment, Alcoholism, Death, Funny Stories, Jokes, Ghost Stories, Candy, Snowmen.  She had to cover over the labels for Love and Marriage because nobody wrote in those journals.
Students read/skim what has come before in the Journal and then add to it.
It's one of the Quick Write options.

Some of the other quick writes are:

* The music in your heart           (I tried this one at school and it was a hit.)  Students make a big heart on a sheet of paper and write songs that are special to them/ their favorites toward the middle of the heart and the songs they dislike out at the edges.  Pick a song and tell its story/ your story.
One student I have is working on writing the story for every single song she chose.  And she is making a digital story to go with it.
* Poetry        Read a poem at the start of class and have students respond to a line in the poem.  No one is required to write poetry in her class.  She uses a lot of Billy Collins, William Stafford, Langston Hughes, Donald Hall and Gary Soto.
* Model Text
Read model text aloud and then quick write.  Sandra Cisneros or Billy Collins.  She might use three model texts and three quick writes, or only write on one.  Mix it up.
* Reading blogs  Every three weeks or so they use quick write time for reading blogs.  These aren't book reports but book talk, the way you would chat with a friend or recommend a title.  They write, pass the notebook, read, write, pass again.
*Show vs. Tell
*Compressing Time  In this section P.K. recommends True Stories: Guides for Writing from Your Life, by Rebecca Rule and Susan Wheeler.  I got the book, because she recommended it so highly.  All I can say so far is that it has one of the worst book covers I've ever seen.
* A Place in Time
* A Moment from Elementary School
*Argue Writes  Each day she brings in an article from the newspaper that provokes a response.  This happens during the editorial writing and argument section of the course.

I wish my 13 year old would come out of her room; we could make up some Interest Journal topics and laugh.  And then maybe we could write.

Moving

New Blog Experiment

The State of Things

I snatched a tid-bit of an email from a friend.  We were talking about two people who have up until recently taught in private schools, or environmental education.  Both are now teaching math in school districts where there are large numbers of students living in poverty.  My friend here is an M.D. working in one of the most poverty-stricken towns in the mid-coast.  He has one child still in private school, and one who just started at a public high school.  My daughter is still in a private school and will probably continue on that path in high school, yet I continue to work in the public school. 

Both comment on the depth and breadth of  deprivation in many of their students.  You know, disadvantaged kids are really... disadvantaged.  In the case of the M. person, he was sick of the kids coming to C. for their semester of envirowhatever at $20,000 for 3 months.   He had also taught at several prep schools.  He says it's by far his hardest job.  J. cannot assume his students have even eaten.  M. has over 60% of the kids on the free lunch program, apparently.   LePage would say that if we lowered that percentage then fewer kids would therefore be getting free lunches.  

What is the answer?  I also know that the M. district has a massive problem with narcotics.  Parents are in prison, or gone.  I met an 8th grader from this district at a Christmas party with Charlie who is living with her grandmother because her mother is a junkie.  The grandmother was describing the new principal at the school .... "She's kind of..." and her grand-daughter broke in, "a butt ... she's kind of a butt!"  They have to walk in straight lines everywhere, like prisoners.

Getting to the point where students are tuned in to literature and writing, geometry and the rest can be an uphill battle when they are just hanging on, surviving.

I'd like to think great books, music, the opportunity to tell a digital story would provide some solace, maybe even an opportunity for change, but first kids need to be in safe homes and have enough food. 

What more is there to say?

This I Believe

I believe in truth.  In boiling life down to the basics.
Driving the point home,  I recently chopped my hair off.  Not shaved to the scalp but I left less than an inch of the gray/white that is coming in these days.  I went from lots of dark hair piled on top of my head, curly strands hanging out of colorful ribbons and headbands, to monk-short and all white in the front.  I believe in having nothing to hide behind.  I believe in getting rid of vanity.
Truth means eating just what I need, even if that makes restaurant-eating a thing of the past.  Kale, green beans, seeds, currants, a little rice or oats, some hemp milk, ghee, and plenty of spices like turmeric, ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon keep me going just fine.  People don't ask if I want a glass of wine anymore and they've stopped making jokes about me (wink, wink) being the life of the party. Those jokes get old, and I am who I am -- mom, friend, daughter, sister, neighbor, teacher.
No one has to wonder what I think, or guess at my mood; it's simple and clear.
The truth means not being my daughter's best friend.  I can't play at being her buddy all the time when I have to set the limits and teach life skills which will serve her well in the long run.  Want to hang out with me yet?  I sound like a treat, I know!
Truth also means laughing until I fall to the floor gasping for air.  And having time to see the people I love best in the world.  It means I do the things I believe in, like hosting movie nights during the long, dark winters so some of us don't shut ourselves in until Spring.  It means walking in the woods and being with the plants and the birds, not always taking pictures of them to post somewhere. It means drawing lichen and moss with a dip pen and ink, with my subjects right there in front of me.  It means wearing warm wool in the winter and cool white cotton in the summer.  It means walking by myself sometimes, having my own thoughts, or being a quiet creature not thinking about anything at all.   The truth is I can't be busy all the time.  The truth is just existing in the snow or the rain or the blazing sun.  Truth changes.  I change.  I used to be married, and now I'm not.  The truth is I used to have long, dark hair, and the truth is that I used to be young.  I'll be 42 in February, which, truth be told, is not very old (now that I'm standing here in the land of 40).
The truth is that I am getting older and I am going to keep getting older.  And one day I will die -- that is the truth.  Why fight it off like a plague?  That is the big truth, isn't it?  That I will die.  My own big truth is that I want to be ready for it, to be at peace, to spend my time here on Earth letting go of all the extra stuff so that by the end I have nothing but the essentials in my heart and my life.   There isn't room to be better or worse than anyone else.  Same same.  All the same.
The truth is I live in the world, I cook for people, I clean my house, I walk the dogs,  I have a partner who copes well with truth, I have a daughter who gives me a run for my money but isn't that the job of a thirteen year old?  It's the world -- some days the sun shines and tall, pink cosmos bloom in the garden and some days (or months) are so cold and dark I forget the truth  -- that the sun will shine again, that it is all a cycle ... we come and we go, but while we are here we can be true and simple and clear -- it's okay.  I believe in truth.

Bella

Here's the Bella story, underpants and all!

BELLA
(This is the link.... Oh, Bella.)

Learning Autobiography

My Learning Autobiography for the Maine Writing Project

January

January is a tough month, but I'm never prepared for it to be as damaging as it is to me.  All I really want to do is read stories.  Long stories with Russian characters who never expect things to turn out well.

Cheerful girl I am today, I know.

Charlie and I walked at Beech Hill yesterday afternoon, while everyone else was watching football ... while Fiona was Facetime-ing her friend in England and not doing her reading.  January.
Thank god Charlie went walking with me.  Last week he told me I needed to get more sunshine.  

Stephen King

I got a Kindle for Christmas -- the kind that only has books; I love it because I'll never get an email notification on it.  At six in the morning I can walk on the treadmill and read.  Lately, Stephen King has been keeping me company.  I have his book, On Writing, up in my room but I had only ever skimmed through it.  Now it's on the Kindle and I'm almost done.  I've always wanted to read a Stephen King book but never could, because I'm just not that kind of girl; I can't subject myself to frightening stories.  Life is enough for me.
Stephen K. is pretty good early morning company.  His opinions are strong and get me thinking.  If you don't read a lot then you're not going to be a writer, that's that.  If you don't talk to people and listen to others talk, then good luck writing dialogue.  Characters drive the story.  Plotting stories is for chumps.  Read, read, read.  Write, write, write.  Adverbs are your enemy.  Be clear, write what is true, story story story -- keep things moving.  Don't write in a passive tense.  Our troops defeated the enemy becomes the weaker: The enemy was defeated by our troops.  (Not his example, I can't remember his right now.)
The passive tense is for passive writers.
Drinking and drugs are not the answer, and I don't think he remembers writing Cujo.
He was pretty drunk for Misery but had great fun writing it.  He started it because of a dream he had during a flight to London.  Wrote in the hotel at Rudyard Kipling's desk, sixteen pages on a yellow legal pad. 

Let's see ... What did Mr. King tell me this morning?  (It's a test of my memory during breaks in the school day to recall what I read at 6 a.m.)
Don't trust pronouns.  He cuts as many as possible in his second draft of a novel.  He says to write that first draft fast and furiously, keeping it to yourself -- writing with the door closed.  Self doubt can be a killer so just keep going.  After it's done he says there should be a minimum of a six week waiting period before even looking at it for revisions and a second draft.  After the six weeks, that's when the door can open for sharing.
Editing set up:  first draft, a legal pad, and plenty of mark-making.  He used an example of a character stealing a few dollars from someone early in a story.  The note in the legal pad read something like: Amy would never steal money. Change this!  p. 91
Then in the manuscript he marks the spot in question with a bold note, knowing that if he makes that kind of mark he can always refer to his notes if needed.
Themes are not something to be afraid of, daunted by ... But the story should come out first and then let the themes emerge, take long walks and think it all over.  Don't sit down and write on a predetermined theme.  He thinks George Orwell even had the story for 1984 before the theme, and plans to ask him about it when he meets him in the ever after.  Not sure that Mr. king believes in Heaven or God.  His main themes are: if there is a god why do so many bad things happen?  Good people doing very bad things.  And the violence that runs through human nature.  The main themes of a person's life will be written about over and over again.
We thought a little about writer's block early this morning when I did not want to be on the treadmill or anywhere else.  Five hundred pages into The Stand (which I have not read) he determined that he did not know where to go... Code Red, CODE RED.  If he'd been 200-300 pages in he thinks he would have abandoned ship, but 500 pages was a big investment of time and energy.  He had a lot of characters to deal with and didn't know what to do, how to sort out where the story would go next, so he started to take very long, boring walks, which were very helpful although they didn't solve the problem right off the bat.  It took some weeks of walking.  But then, in a flash, the whole thing came to him.  He went home and wrote one to two pages of notes he was so afraid of forgetting how it could all unfold.
It's interesting to read descriptions of how he dealt with the nuts and bolts of a story I never read.  It might mean a lot more to me had I read his books, but I love it anyway.  I love to know the story behind the story.

Have an Ideal Reader who you are always imagining as you write.  For S.K. it is his wife, Tabby.
The second draft should be 10% shorter than the first.
Research should stay as far in the background as possible.
Don't bore people with too much back story.  His wife told him not to bore her with what a character did for community service in the year he spent with writer's block.  He cut 2-3 pages down to a paragraph; no one cares about those details.  He watches to see when his wife will put the manuscript down.  He waits for the laughs, he watches her while she reads sometimes and she tells him he's needy.  He says writers are needy between the first and second draft.

Writing Retreats and Writing Classes
He thinks the retreat sounds like a great fantasy -- someone silently leaving a boxed lunch at your cabin door every day so that your creative process won't be disrupted.  The quiet woods, the gatherings in the evening at the lodge to roast marshmallows and talk about works in progress.
Other writers offering comments like: I like the use of tone and imagery... I can almost see it, like, you know...
Mr. King firmly believes first drafts need to be written with the door closed (and this retreat business doesn't allow for that) and the feedback might not be so productive anyway.
Writing classes can be good, and especially because a writer can connect with helpful people the way he did in a composition class as a young man.  He quotes a figure of 5% when determining how many writers actually make a living strictly from writing, hence there are a lot of writers out there teaching. Take their classes, learn what you can.
Agents
It's not so impossible to get an agent.
Get The Writer's Market, read the magazines you are submitting to, and write well-crafted letters to potential agents.  (I'm not so interested in this part.)

I finished the book today.
I waited until the sky was turning light before I got out of bed this morning, which made all the difference in the world.  I went to the treadmill and got right back to Stephen King.
This morning I got to the hardest part of the book for me to read -- his accident.
The man driving the van was on his way down to the store "to get some of those Marzes-bars."  His dog, Bullet, was after some meat in a cooler which distracted him to the point where he came over a hill driving on the shoulder.  He thought he hit a small deer.  But then there were bloody spectacles on his passenger seat.  Mr. King had been hit and then thrown over the van, landing behind it just shy of a pile of rocks.  The EMTs didn't think he would make it.  One of them said to the driver as they got going in the ambulance, "You better hit it hard," and so they drove 110 mph on back roads to get him to the hospital.  They determined he needed to be life-flighted elsewhere.  His lungs collapsed as they began the flight.  The guy who hit him had another dog at home named, Pistol.  Stephen King was struck that he had just nearly been killed by one of his characters.  He wasn't sure he would make it.  He told people, "Tell Tabby I love her."  That made me start to cry.

The surgeon saved him, and his wife saved him ... but writing again helped a lot.  He had things to say, he had to finish this book.

He added in a section showing part of a first draft of a short story.  Then he showed the edits.  He had Strunk in mind.  Cut needless words.  Cut cut cut.
He also provided two big lists of recommended books.
I'll go back to the list after I finish The Goldfinch. 

But Ugh, the accident.  I had to write a learning autobiography last week and now this book with the  being hit by a car business; it has thrown me for a minor loop.  The woman who hit me had also had a very bad driving history -- she was driving a rental car when she hit me because she had just driven into a storefront the week before.  She was not even aware that she had hit any"thing" at first.  I was also thrown.  But I was in Boston, not in the middle of nowhere.  My driver was not on her way for Marzes-bars, but her name was Cookie and my postcard image as I became conscious was of her blood red fingernails.

Because Writing Matters, National Writing Project and Carl Nagin

Book Response:  Because Writing Matters

I read this entire book while walking on the treadmill early in the morning.  It was a pretty good way to begin the day, even though I was thinking, “I’ll get this reading done early so I’ll be able to get back to The Goldfinch later tonight.”  I agree whole-heartedly with the ideas presented in the book and love imagining a place where all of the grammar and punctuation worksheets disappear and writing workshops, where students write every single day, pop up.  Students need to write like real writers — people who have a purpose and an audience.  Their practice with the art and craft of writing must mirror the real deal, or else they’ll just be floundering around learning mechanical rules out of context and churning out formulaic five paragraph essays.  Not very long ago writing was mostly about handwriting and then it was all about mechanical skills.  I love this passage from the book:

    Emphasis on mechanical errors overshadowed the deep rhetorical, social, and cognitive     possibilities of writing for communication and critical thinking.  This was a pedagogic view of     writing not unlike the idea that a young person could learn to drive a car by memorizing state     motoring laws and reading a repair  manual.  Undoubtedly, such texts might help a driver save     on repairs, memorize rules of the road, and pass the written test, but that knowledge is no      substitute for sitting behind the wheel and driving in a variety of conditions, preferably with an     instructor in the passenger seat.  (Loc. 572 — Kindle)

Students need to write in a variety of genres.
Students need to write across the curriculum, not just in English classes.
Writing helps to develop higher-order thinking skills like analyzing, synthesizing, evaluation and interpreting.  Writing asks more of students than to repeat facts, dates, and formulae.  Writing makes them question their assumptions and to reflect critically on alternative viewpoints.  (Loc. 620)

Because Writing Matters provides concrete first steps toward the business of getting students to write across the curriculum.  “Select important articles in your field, and ask students to write summaries or abstracts of them …. Think of a controversy in your field, and ask students to write a dialogue between characters with different points of view.”  (Loc. 652)

Writing is recursive.  We don’t necessarily make a straight shot from the rough draft to the final product.  The process cycles and recycles.  The subprocesses described in the book are:

1. Planning (generating ideas, setting goals, and organizing)
2. Translation (turning plans into written language)
3. Reviewing (evaluating and revising)
                                                                   (Loc. 670)

Even the experienced writer will not have a fixed order for cycling through this process.  With that in mind, it seems silly to pass a rough draft in for a grade.  Shouldn’t students be able to live the genuine process and pass in the work for a grade once the revising is complete?  I think they should learn and write the way writers write.  I also see some pitfalls.  Out and about in the schools, students use Spark Notes in place of reading their assigned novels , and I don’t see a majority of students caring to revise and then revise some more.  Typically, these are not my own students, but kids I know for various reasons — ones willing to share their secrets.  I’ll keep this short and say that unless the kids have a real reason to care about their assignments and have real audience , they get a little lost and apathetic.

Reading and writing go together, for young students and for English Language Learners.  We don’t need to master our reading skills before we set pen to paper.  I particularly enjoyed the discussion about students and teachers being asked to write in their native language.  Yes, English will still be taught, but connecting to the language of choice — the language of home can help access the most genuine material.

I’m impressed by the administrators who have revamped their schools to reflect the importance of writing, especially when they have thrown off the shackles of standardized test anxiety, and just taught in the most effective way, trusting that it would, in the long haul, benefit their students and the test scores.

The word is being spread by the National Writing Project and its teachers.  I’m pleased that so much emphasis is being placed on teachers writing themselves and having time for professional development.  That point needs to keep being pressed.
I hope I can pass on some of what I’ve taken in to help the cause.

Ideas for This I Believe

I believe in hot flashes at 41, almost 42... don't say I'm too young, not one more person, because apparently I am not too young.  Check out how much I believe in white hair.  Total belief.  I also believe in fragments, and calling dogs bad names.  Children too, if they have a sense of humor and they are from your own uterus, not such a great idea if they're from a foreign uterus.  I believe that my daughter's Lit. teacher told her that she's as dumb as a brick yesterday.  Good for her, isn't private school nice?  You can call your students dumb, and also push them into snow banks, as long as they have a sense of humor and are not prone to becoming injured easily.  I believe that my little dog can be spiteful with her urine. 
I believe that my grandmother cut all of her hair off when she started getting hot flashes too.  She looked like a Barbie doll, all legs and bosom.  Me... not so much. 

I believe that my grandparents had extreme personalities and were searching for something, something big.   Atheism for Grandma ... left her body to a medical school ... grandpa believed in a God who looked a lot like a Jesuit priest.  He said two hours of prayers every morning before going off to pull teeth and make gold fillings.  He did not believe in giving his family novocaine.  That worked out for me because my teeth were fine, not so much for the rest of them.  Too bad for you, imperfect teeth family members.  I sat reading Highlights magazine while grandpa hoisted his foot onto the edge of the chair to get leverage to pull your teeth out while you writhed in pain.
Don't worry, I got mine.  Boys go to Harvard, girls make dried out pot roast, unless they're nuns and then they get to study Latin and live in the loveliest convents on Earth with beautiful, old furniture, peace and quiet and plenty of books and time to pray.  Oh, when I was little I believed in being a nun.
I believe I was a nun and a monk over and over and over again.  If you want to know what I believe it is that ... that we circle around and around.  I believe what the Buddhists believe.  I was raised Catholic, I had a heavy dose of the incense and candles, Latin and rosaries... I kind of loved it and felt warm and at home mostly, especially when Grandpa and Sister Miriam Catherine were close by ... but I believe what the Buddhists believe and so I perform my actions without being attached to the fruits of my actions.  I believe that writing is difficult because I am letting go of all the extra stuff and writing seems extra.  I believe I should be working in an orphanage somewhere, taking care of children, cooking food, washing clothes, repairing things, growing vegetables and flowers, picking fruit, reading and singing and drawing pictures in the dirt, being a mom to the mom-less.  I believe it is not necessary to have all of these things that I am surrounded by.
I believe I have to figure out a way to become quiet about this issue, at least for the next six years.  Ibelieve, for now, I can do the best I can right here.