Minutes (Maribeth)

Breakfast

            This morning, Amy brought delicious sausage balls and her husband cooked luscious banana bread (oh so moist)!  Thanks Amy and husband for the bountiful feast this morning!

 

Morning Announcements and Other Miscellaneous Stuff

This morning, we decided how we would shape our minutes.  We discussed the warmth of the minutes and how they should be written in a narrative form.  Whitney also added that they should be written from our own voice to preserve our memories from our writing project.  Dr. Whyte suggested changing the term “Minutes” to “Moments.”

Lorie was grateful that someone discarded the dead flowers from her vase.  She is now using this as a piece of her “writing space.” 

            Whitney gave us permission to smack John if he gets in our face with the “paparazzi camera.”

 

Morning Writing Invitation

            Yvonne shared the morning writing invitation with us.  Her invitation was from Steven King about James Joyce’s writing life.  King makes the point that writers should utilize their talent to the fullest extent: “If God gives you something you can do, why in God’s name would you not do it?”  This really spoke to me because I believe, as well, that people should embrace their abilities and use them for good purposes.

           

It really cracked me up when Lori and Jennifer commented that their writing spaces included Skittles, Whoppers, Twizzlers, and Reese Cups.  (A writing space formed by candy and chocolate: sounds perfectly acceptable to me!)  Of course, you can’t forget that chocolate is a vegetable because it’s a product of the cocoa BEAN.  And, after all, beans are vegetables.

 

 

Holly’s TIW

            This morning, Holly presented her TIW: Espionage and Icebergs (A fantastic title!).  She said that her unit stemmed from the need to have a creative writing to break up the monotony of the other heavier writings that they must write throughout the year.  Her Essential Questions

dealt with authentic dialogue and revision techniques.  She delved into Hemingway’s writing style and guided us to point out the stylistic features of his writing that all writers should utilize: write simply, write only the tip of the ice-berg, write from observation, and write using positive wording (not negative wording).

            Teacher Holly had us go outside of the classroom and discover a piece of authentic language and bring it back into the classroom.  We had to write one sentence that we discovered on a piece of colored paper.  Then, we discussed each sentence and the ways it could be shaped to form a narrative or other piece of writing. 

            Jevette’s laugh was hilarious when Alyson read Michael’s sentence: “You’re gonna have to go down first!”  Here are the other sentence gems we discovered as we were eavesdropping on random strangers:

• “Hey!  Guess what we should do on Friday and Sunday?”
• “We should definitely go get my car and go.  How do we get there?  We’ve got to find it.  How are we going to find it?”
• “That is so stupid!  What else did she say?
• “Dad!  Father.”
• “You’re gonna have to go down first!”
• “What time is the visitation?”
• “It’s all just a bit overwhelming right now.”
• “I hit a girl in the face with it.  On the bus.”
• “What do you mean, it fell off?”
• “He called me and told me.  He was like, Man!  People are using the Port-a-Potties and waiting around and everything.  It’s like going to Florida.   /     Oh! We go to Florida every year – to Naples.  It’s awful.  All the snowbirds.  You get stuck in that inside lane.  Florida is awful.”
• “No, no man.  We were in the dorms… There was a magician…”
• “If he wants to fail you, he can work a way around so you fail.”
• “That’s the problem then.  These are for students in the College of Education.”
• “Hey, I heard there was something called Camp War Eagle Love.  /    Is it where you fall in love with your counselor?   /    Oh my gosh, I heard about that!  (whispers…)    Ewww… Gross!  /  No, I heard it really happened.  It’s Camp War Eagle Love.”
• “Put six students in the van and get them down here to Haley Center.”
• “The plain on plain goes to the girl in the white shirt.”

 

Response to TIW:

• Jevette discovered that a deck of 52 cards on the sale table in the bookstore could serve as dialogue / story starter. 
• Jennifer commented that the standards hold us accountable for learning how to use “flowery” writing (adjectives, words other than said, metaphors, etc…).  (Yet another reason “standards” are never really standard and sometimes never accomplish their intended objectives.)

 

 

Lori G’s TIW

Her was all about teaching narrative writing using picture books.  She read to us “Thank You, Mr. Falker” and explained her bog “book talk” she would have with her students as she traversed throughout the book.  I noticed that she has post-it notes to prompt herself to ask students questions as she reads the book aloud to her students.  The book pulled at my heartstrings – especially the part where the narrator says she hopes the people at her new school wouldn’t realize how “dumb” she was.  It made me really feel for the little girl.  It reminded me of cruel things kids said to me as a child.  Lori had such a nice reading voice.  She really made the book feel alive to the listener. You could feel how emotionally tied she was with the book and that, to me, is one of the greatest indicators that a teacher really cares about what she is teaching.  After reading the book, she explained that she wanted her students to put as much emotion into their writing as Patricia Polacco does. 

We, then, wrote one of our old teachers a letter, telling them how they “touched” and changed our lives.  Lori read her letter aloud, and our audience could hear her authentic voice through her writing.  She had such genuine emotion; I think I speak for all of us in saying that it was truly moving.  The entire experience was very inspiring.  By the end of the lesson, we were all in tears.   

Responses:

·      Jennifer suggested also using this lesson and including coaches, mentors, relatives, friends, and other people who have impacted us so profoundly.

·      Then, Dr. Whyte started a round-circle discussion of the people we are all so thankful for having impacted our lives.

 

After Lori’s TIW, we had “Personal Reading and Study” time.  Many people discussed what they were writing about and the need for more Writing Response Group time.

            At the end of the day, John ended with a story from Zig-Zag.  A young boy went to a school where the media specialist (or librarian, for us old-schoolers) censored books by marking out the “bad” words and situations.  When he was older, the guy bought a record from the library of Hemmingway’s poems (self-read) only to find out that the controversial sections had been scratched off the record with a razor blade.  Censorship: keeping people ignorant, one book at a time.

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