Day 3 at SI

During our third day at SI everyone seemed to be getting into their respective grooves. I was quite tired and on my forth day of going caffeine free (mostly), but this led to even better conversations than I normally get because I was too tired to try and be political and was simply honest in my conversations. This is the context of teaching writing discussions and actually talking about how to better balance my life so that I would be healthy and clear— a very important part of teaching that is often left separated. Today we had two excellent presentations, which left me slightly intimidated to do my own presentation, but were both fun and provoking of thoughts. My mind was brought out of its Summer vacation house and allowed to play for a while. The first one was from Joshonai, a fifth grade teacher, who had three separate poems to show us—all linked to the concept of memoir. We read the poems, wrote freestyle responses, and then talked about our responses with a partner. This three-step process turned out to be a perfect cocktail of learning, a ‘professmapolitan,’ if you will— if you won’t, I’m still going there. The reading gave us some ideas, the writing let us come up or out with our own, and the talking about it instilled it in our minds and helped fill in any gaps in our thinking by having two minds. I shall have to remember to keep all three of these together. The second presentation we had today was designed for a class just out of high school. It consisted of a randomizing of groups exercise by popular famous persons in different fields, coming up with what a freshman would have been told were the good tenants of writing, and then organizing famous pieces of writing according to the tenants we had chosen as a group. There were things like the “To be or not to be” speech vs. “Smells like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana. It was a thought provoking comparison. The exercise re-sparked this ongoing conversation we hear about in the English community about high-school rubrics and how they harm the development of writers because they appeal to semi-arbitrary rules of writing. Many of our high school teachers are frustrated because they find the way teaching English is structured in public high schools to be unfairly limited based on provisions passed in the “No Child Left Behind” act. This seems to be a temporary hiccup in our nation’s English world, but every year that it goes by unchanged our students suffer a bit.