how to think...

How to Think/We Need Time To/Be Real creators/Turn unconventional Ideas Into News./Unite Spectacular Cosmic Leaps/dance, fool, enchant/Imagine Disaster and/Survive The World/then Stay That Way

Sometimes I have these days...like today, the last day before spring break...when I decide to make paper airplanes out of my lesson plans and take a little side trip.  April is National Poetry Month, so all of my classes have been working with poetry in one way or another.  My eighth graders have been reading one poem a day, and we've had some wonderful discussions about them--about what they mean and how they're formed and how to read them.  My sixth graders have been playing with language, experimenting with poetic devices, making games out of rhyme and rhythm, and writing simile and metaphor riddles.  We've spent some time looking at the found poetry at Newspaper Blackout, and today I decided we'd make some cut-out poems using old newspapers and magazines.

I thought maybe we'd spend twenty minutes on it.  We spent the whole 80 minute block doing it, and although every student approached the assignment with a different style and level of enthusiasm, almost all of them managed to put together some interesting combinations of words and phrases.  Some of them are amazing!

I spent my own prep time today creating a found poem out of an old TIME magazine, and this week (while we're on break), I'm going to post some of my students' poems on our In the Middle (of a Good Book) blog, which has been languishing since the start of the new quarter, as I'm now lacking a blogging elective class and haven't quite figured out how to organize my bloggers into an extracurricular force of awesomeness.

In the meantime, here's a taste, with two of my favorites, from Abbey and Caleb.  Enjoy!

When you finally/ get me I turn into a/ massive disaster/

 that makes you want to/ Try harder./ Thank you

Live it that way/tough guys enjoy people who kill the/love storys that look/bigger and better/to fix/what's wrong/with/me

Happy Birthday, Jabber!

When he was nearly three, Jabber patted my gigantic belly and said he would share his toys, he would share his bedroom, but he absolutely would NOT share his birthday with his little brother. So how did that work out for him?  Well, I have to admit that he only readily shares the toys he doesn't much care for.  And the two brothers only peacefully share their bedroom for about sixty seconds a day.  But when Monkey was born the day before Jabber's birthday--an act merely the beginning of a long series of "ME FIRST" moments--Jabber handled the situation with a graceful sort of resignation.  He is...to the best of his abilities, a kind and patient and generous big brother. 

One thing Jabber savors is stories.  Over the last couple of nights, we've been telling stories of the kids as babies, and Jabber hangs on every word.  He loves to listen to a book read out loud, especially books about heroes just a teensy bit more adventurous than he.  He feels deeply, right along the characters, his whole body twisting with anxiety when the action gets tense.  For a while he hated reading--cried and freaked out every time he was asked to do it. He could read.  He could sound out the words.  But it was so much effort--how can you enjoy a story when you have to sound it out letter by letter?  I fought him to get the homework done, and I simply hated the fact that our favorite activity, story time, was turning into a stressful battle. 

Finally I managed to get to the bottom of this issue and I talked with him about how, once you get a lot of practice at reading, you can identify whole words or phrases in one glance.  We used the word automaticity, and he giggled as he said it.  We started reading each page in a book in unison, twice, and then he would read it on his own in his "automatic reading voice."  Which meant fast.  Instantly, all our fights about reading disappeared.  Jabber wanted to practice reading so that he could get automatic: he just wanted to move beyond the letter-by-letter decoding stage and back into the enjoying stories stage.

I can't believe how far he has come in the last year, between age six and age seven.  I look at him sometimes, or overhear some tidbit of wisdom he is either mumbling aloud or trying out on me, and I can't even believe he's for real.  He's such a thinker.

This morning we were, as we often are, running late for work.  It was his birthday, and I was trying to go easy on him, to let him enjoy the feeling of waking up with the whole day belonging to him. But the clock keeps ticking, and the van needs scraping, and the younger brother--tired out from his own ME FIRST birthday--is grumpy, and...well.

"Jabber," I said, as he stood in the bathroom with his toothbrush in his hand, in exactly the same position I'd left him five minutes earlier.  "Why aren't you doing anything? Come ON."

"But I was doing something," he said, slowly lifting his toothbrush up to his mouth.

"You were not doing anything," I argued.  "You were just standing there, holding your brush."

"I was thinking," he said.  And of course he was.

(It's a Pikachu cake)

Happy Birthday, my Daydreamer!

sick day homeschool

So all three of us were out sick today with a creepy, fever-cough flu-thing, so I was lying in my bed drifting in and out of consciousness while the boys were supposed to be "resting" in their bedroom.

Before long, I heard some rather organized imagination play going on.  From the sounds of it, Jabber and Monkey were playing school.

For a while, things went well.  Jabber got out some paper and pencils and labored to teach his brother the art of  proper letter formation.

Jabber:  Oh!  That's a very nice E!  Normally, we only use three lines going across, but you got it facing the right way and everything.

Monkey: *makes siren noise*

Jabber:  Monkey! It's time to do the R!  Come on.  Start with one line down, like this.

Monkey:  WhoooooooooOOOOOOOOoooooooo!

Jabber:  Are you even listening to me?  Monkey!  Monkey.  Come on.  This is serious.  See my R?  See if you can do it just like that.

Monkey:  *jumps up and down*

Jabber: You can't make your R look right while you're jumping.  Please sit down.  PLEASE SIT DOWN!

Monkey:  I did it already!  I'm done!  I'm done! *jump jump jump*

Jabber: (exasperated)  MONKEY.  Where is your paper??

Monkey:  (completely unconcerned comment tossed out in between his enthusiastic gun-shooting sound effects)  Oh, that paper?  I dunno.  I threw it on the floor over there somewhere.

Jabber:  What?  We don't throw our papers on the floor, Monkey.  You have to turn them in to your teacher.

Monkey:  *cackles loudly, interspersed with more gun sound effects*  Well, go pick it up then.  I don't care.  SCHOOL IS BORRRRRRING!

***

Oh, dear.  That is all.

the shame that sticks

It's the end of the school year, and it seems every time I open my mouth to speak to a student, something sappy comes out.  I'm awkward with goodbyes, with telling the kids how much they mean to me, but at the same time I want them to know.  Middle school is such a crazy time--I want to somehow tell each student all the good things I can see underneath that rough exterior.  I want to give them these words to remember, encase them in glass, like a keepsake they can take out and study at some point in the future when they think back about their middle school teachers, something positive to block out that one time I gave them an exasperated sigh or maybe even a bitingly sarcastic comment. 

It's funny, though.  No matter how carefully I choose my words, it's unlikely those will be the ones they remember.  I'm well into my third decade of life, and although my memories of elementary, middle, and high school are a bit blurry overall, there are these moments that are as clear to me now as the moment they happened.  Clear as though they were encased in glass, actually.  And I would venture that, of the memories involving teachers, none of them are moments that those teachers really wanted me to keep. 

My clearest memory of kindergarten is a sulking glimpse of my class playing "Skip to my Lou" from my spot behind the cloakroom door, where I had been sent after I had demonstrated a karate kick which resulted in my little brown oxford shoe flying off my foot.  "We don't kick our shoes at people," my teacher said, and to this day I can feel a sense of burning injustice and shame.

I have lots of memories of second grade, but two of the most vivid also involve shame, or at least morbid embarrassment.  Looking at them from my grown up angle, I'm sure they were completely unintentional on the part of my lovely teacher, but at the time, I wanted to curl up and die.  One was pretty common for me--I never could shut up, and my teacher chastised me in front of the class for talking to my friend Mark, except she hinted that there was a romantic bent to our purely platonic (and, if it's possible for two second graders, purely intellectual) yet nonstop conversation.  I remember Mark's ears were a deep shade of red, and I thought I'd never forgive her for embarrassing me like that. 

The other memory was about my school picture.  It was ugly.  Or rather, I was making a very weird face in it.  I can actually remember the entire sequence of events with the photographer, how he patronized me and how I made a dumb face at him because I wasn't good at hiding my disgust with adults when they were stupid.  But the embarrassing part was when my teacher got the proofs for the photos and said to me, in front of the class, "Elissa, come up here and look at your picture.  You want retakes, right?"  For some strange reason, this mortified me--that she would tell the whole class that my photo was ugly, basically.  I flounced up to her desk, took one brief look at the photo (with my vision all red as I'm sure my face was as well), and declared, "I like my picture.  I meant for it to look that way."

That was a complete lie, of course, and at the time I had no idea why I even said it.  The next week or whatever when I got my pictures, I was too shy to go back up and ask her to get retakes.  Too proud, maybe.  So to this day, my second grade picture features a smart aleck girl making a weird smirking face that shows her complete contempt for the photographer.  And every time I look at it, I remember that moment of flouncing up to her desk.

There are  more of these memories...many for each year of my schooling.  These are my mildest moments of shame; I'd feel bad writing publicly about the ones that hurt the most--the ones that still sting now instead of making me laugh, as these do now.  It's possible I'm just very sensitive to being embarrassed, but I would guess that I'm not alone in this, that many people carry with them the memories of those small shamings.

Right now, the boys and I are reading the Ramona Quimby books out loud at bedtime, and so many of the events in Cleary's books are about moments just like the ones I remember.  As we read, we laugh at the image of Ramona, always misunderstood.  We can relate to those moments.  And I can only hope a few of the other moments stick, too, the ones that let my students know that I care.

jabberish

Well, we all survived the start of school, and Jabber seems to have enjoyed it the most out of all of us. He sums up his experience with these great words of wisdom: "Kindergarten is...um...kindergarten is cool."

We've had some good conversations about the process--one rather amusing one in which Jabber told Ms. N. and me about making a new best friend.

Jabber: Well, you know, I made a new best friend today, but I don't remember his name. He had a coat with stainless steel buttons, though. They were shiny. And he had a voice like a doctor.
Me: (laughing) A voice like a doctor? So like, did he use really big words or something?
Jabber: (shrugs) He just sounded like a doctor.
Ms. N.: What does a doctor sound like? Can you show me what he sounds like?
Jabber: (gives Ms. N. an incredulous look) Well, I can't repeat it, you know, because I can't change my voice. I have MY voice, not his!

We laughed. I have to admit, I want to meet this nameless kid with the shiny buttons just to hear his voice.

On the second day, the bus--which picks Jabber up from my school--came early, and we missed it. Ooops! MOMFAIL. David drove over quickly and picked him up, and all was well, but the next day I suggested that Jabber accompany Mr. L., the "Assertive Discipline Coordinator" for our school, down to the buses, since then he'd be sure to not miss his bus. I had a meeting, so I asked Jabber if he'd be willing to go alone with Mr. L. He surprised me by agreeing without hesitation (Mr. L. is a very nice guy, but I'll admit he does look capable of some pretty assertive discipline). After school, I said, "Jabber, I'm proud of you for being brave and going down with Mr. L. all by yourself."

He shrugged and said, "Oh, that's okay, Mom. I just pretended he was you." Um, okay.

In other news, he has started reading after one week of kindergarten. The two things may or may not be related, but all summer we read together and occasionally talked about letter sounds and stuff. At the time, Jabber didn't really "get" it; he totally nailed the initial consonant, and everything else was a big mystery. But the other night we went for a drive in our new car, and suddenly we heard Jabber shouting from the backseat, "PISS! PISS! PISS!"

I turned around, rather alarmed at the language (he MUST have picked that up from school, I thought), but Jabber was gleeful and excitedly pointing at the red seatbelt buckle. "IT SAYS PISS!"

"Oh. I think you're missing a letter," I said, laughing a little. "There's an R in there."

I didn't really expect him to be able to change his sounding-out strategy, but sure enough, he whispered back there for a few moments and then correctly said, "PRESS! PRESS!"

It was exciting, but not nearly so exciting as the following morning as I was driving Monkey to daycare, and I overheard Jabber teasing him from the backseat.

"You have letters on your leg, Monkey," Jabber said, and I didn't pay too much attention, my mind on the day ahead. But then I heard him back there making those "sound it out" noises, and eventually, he said, "F...R...S...A...L!"

Well, that doesn't actually spell anything. I dismissed it as jibberish. jabberish. But then.

"MOM! I'm going to write letters on Monkey's leg that say FOR SALE! Can we sell him now?"

Wow!

Kindergarten!

So I'm flippin' exhausted today, after my own first day of school, but not too exhausted to CELEBRATE Jabber's very first EVER day of school! Yay, Jabber, and welcome to the educational system! Because of my schedule and David's schedule and money and a bunch of other factors, we never sent him to any kind of preschool, just a lovely home daycare, where he played like a champ and slowly learned to stop biting and hitting people (though his brother obviously doesn't count as people). I've worried just a little about how he would deal with school--with the structure and the long hours (he goes from 8:30-4:00 every day!), but he did a splendid job on the first day of kindergarten.

Here he is, back full circle to hanging out in my classroom in the mornings, attending the teacher meetings and eating his breakfast out of tupperware while Mama makes copies. When Jabber was an infant, David worked from some godawful early hour to 8:00 am, when he would come and pick up the baby from my school and care for him the rest of the day. I have lots of memories of Jabber jabbering through morning meetings or maybe sleeping in my sling or even exploring the amazing treasures of the art teacher's closet, but my favorite memory of that time has got to be the day my boss made the mistake of trying to lead our meeting while eating a banana. Jabber basically would not let the meeting proceed until he had relinquished it.

Anyway, I like having my little guy around once again, and I feel good that his first bus ride is a short trip with no stops (and no middle school kids on the bus).



And here he is on the bus itself, though I had only a moment to snap it in between explaining his allergy to the bus driver and trying to show him what you do with a backpack the size of four kindergarteners in the cramped confines of a bus seat. He was brave and happy on the bus, and David says he had no trouble finding his way to the classroom once he arrived.

His first day went well, and he fell off to sleep this evening with the words, "I'm even more excited for tomorrow!"

We kind of thought it might be an adjustment for Monkey to be at daycare all alone, but when D. picked him up, they had this conversation.

D: Did you miss your brother today?
Monkey: Who?
D: Um, your brother? Jabber?
Monkey: Ohhh. Yeah. Where is he, anyway?

So apparently not. :)

Hoping for an equally good tomorrow, for both of us! And now, sleeeeeep.