Day 5 at SI

July 9, 2013 at SI 6 word memoirs What are we doing, oh memoir! I only have six words to… Woke up, woke up, woke up Where am I? What is that? Playing, Yay! Working, Boo! Teaching, Booyah! Reading Envy and Free writing – We underlined key words or phrases, and then read them allowed like we were at a Quaker wedding. The language of the story was older- a 1950’s written language that I have never heard but only read about or falsely heard through screenplays reformed into movie quotes. What did these people really sound like? I wonder. My version of a selected paragraph: Growing up, I could have died from an overexposure to positive energy. It was the only time in my life I’ve ever felt complete, and the only time where I was consistently happy. My mom was always around, I got to play with my brother and friends outside, all the time. I had so many good close and warm people, and felt so safe that I was just as happy when I was alone. As opposed to my later years, when being alone seemed to make me feel so vulnerable, open to harm. When I was a child, I played in my imagination constantly, totally happy and self-entertained, but fully unprepared for the blight of real world suffering. Next we made drawings of Sandra’s life from Envy: Then we had our break at 10:45. This led into an analysis of Sir Francis Bacon’s Of Studies, which we broke down and discussed in multi-faceted ways. We broke into groups, we highlighted key phrases, we did a round-robin read of our most important sentence… Sally had us try and insert paragraphs into the piece, as it was written before the printing press/ before there were paragraph breaks, which was interesting. I was noticing how not having paragraph breaks makes all sentences more transitional. Imagine how exhausting it would be to be constantly transitioning? Perfect Circle is to real world circle As Ideal Paragraph is to ? Writing is linked to ideas – Brannon Thoughts: These scissors are a paragraph- look! This object is a circle, it looks circular to us, but this is a language we created, and so is English, so see the scissors as a paragraph – what does it look like? What does this mean for language? Wri How is Sir Francis Bacon’s Of Studies relative to us as teachers today? I especially bonded with the simplicity of his breakdown. I need more experience to match all this reading and learning that I’ve been doing, and it really is making me feel slothful, because I’m not getting enough practice. The other’s in this class either have a much more thorough teaching background or are currently teachers, but I’m not and I’m starved for action! I want to change real world things. Grammar and Conventions: The way that we teach grammar and conventions in grade school often hinders writing development. Developing writing takes motivation and desire, whereas repetition and out of context exercises are mundane, and quell that all important love that writers cradle as carefully as a premature baby. With that said, they are immensely important. Conventions are constraints, and all writing has constraints. Grammar is further down the line on importance, but can be beautiful. Grammar is a tool, not rule. Our computers judge our grammar now – expand Consistency is important for Grammar, as long as we can find the method, the meaning. Rule comprehension: This made me think about how grammar and comprehension was originally organized. It was thought out a few different ways and then they picked one that accounted for a lot of different ways to do things. This doesn’t account for every possibility, but still shows a general intuition geared toward working through grammar.