The Dog House....

**This is my non-fiction draft that I may turn into a historical fiction sometime....this is my first memory and one of my favorites because I'm such an animal person.  I guess I'd like some suggestions on how to better develop this story's purpose (and any other suggestions!!).  This is just a rough draft sort of my write from the power point, so its short.....thank you!!

     It was a horrific sound at two years old, hearing my Mom sobbing in the kitchen.  My Dad had just returned from the Pet and Seed store where he went to get tomato plants and I didn't know what was going on.  I remember wandering in to see what was wrong and what I saw in front of me was about to change my life!  Mom was sitting at the kitchen table with a big brown box at her feet.  I ran quickly up to her, and as soon as I looked in the box, my concern was replaced with joy - it was a puppy!!!!!  Brown with white legs that had little chocolate freckles, Lucy (as she would eventually be named), was one of the most exciting sights my young eyes had ever seen!  While my mind could only comprehend the joy of the time, I've come to learn it wasn't such a fairytale for everyone involved.  While my Mom would grow to love the sweet English Springer Spaniel with golden eyes and floppy ears, it wasn't the instant winning of the heart that my Dad, sister, and I experienced.  However, after my Dad and Lucy's first couple of nights sleeping in his truck, Mom's heart began to thaw, they were allowed in the real house, rather than the 'dog house.'

Love

Love never fails,

It's this PROMISE I cling too.

It's my light in the dark,

My warmth in the rain.

It helps me hold on to hope,

In the midst of bitter pain.

Faith, hope, and love.  These three remain.

Love never fails,

Though many times I do.

Yet when I keep trying,

Love always sees me through.

Love never fails,

I hope to always be,

In my actions and my words,

An act of love for thee.

Love never fails.

Punctuation Mini-Lesson

This post is related to the mini-lesson.  The Writer's Workshop Blog Post for this past week is the post before this one ("There is Always Something to be Thankful For")!  Thank you!


vIs it better to use fiction or non-fiction to teach punctuation?  Explain.

vAre examples, like the one on the right, appropriate to use with students if they could have a negative meaning?

vWhat are some ideas to improve this mini-lesson?

Please post your responses in the comment section!  Thank you!

There is ALWAYS Something to be Thankful For

**I didn't have enough space on my camera to take pictures of my rough draft, so while this is typed, it is not meant to be my 'published' version!!  :)

"There is always something to be thankful for."

These words were spoken from a father to his son as they sat in a concentration camp watching a Nazi soldier beat an innocent prisoner, like themselves.

"What is there to be thankful for in this?" asked the child, while continuing to watch the horror.

As the father looked towards the Nazi soldiers, he replied "be thankful......

There is always something to be thankful for?

I know how to be thankful when something good happens.  When things are going well, when its easy.  I know how to be thankful for a gift, when things are fun, exciting, positive.  Thankfulness seems natural when things are going right, going well, when I can see the light.

But how can I be thankful for this?

I was thankful, overjoyed, when I got my dream job the day before school started.  I was thankful for the mess I inherited - not a single note or piece of curriculum to be found and a newly combined 6/7/8 grade class waiting to be taught.  I am still thankful for all that came with this gift!  I am thankful for the long hours, the lack of sleep.  I am thankful for the fight to save our beloved school and for the way it was saved.  I am thankful that it turned around, and for the even longer hours, less pay, new responsibilities, new frustrations, and the new vision that came with it.  I am thankful for the unity in the community, and for the miraculous amount of money that came out of nowhere, even though we could have done without it.  I am thankful that we met our enrollment benchmarks given by downtown.  I am thankful that for every reason they tried to give for shutting us down, we proved them wrong.  I am thankful for the family that we had become!  I am even thankful for the new wrinkles I developed over these incredible two years, because the kids and school made me smile every moment of every day.

But how can I be thankful now?

Now that the light has been stolen.  When those who don't know or agree with our vision make a decision based on lies and politics.  How can I be thankful when the unjust has stolen what was right and good?  How can I be thankful when those who never even stopped by or took time to learn and see the truth, closed our school?  How can I be thankful when they changed the locks, packed up my things, my dreams, and never even gave me a chance?  How can I be thankful when they haven't even spoken to me?  How can I be thankful knowing our precious students lost their safe haven, that those who had found us and found new hope and refuge from bullies and hatred have been rejected.  How can I be thankful when our dream, our home, our family has been shattered?  How do I give thanks for the lies and deception?  How can I be thankful for the pain and sorrow, the deep longing and the feelings of loss?  How can I be thankful when something so right was stolen by something so wrong?

"What is there to be thankful for in this?" asked the child while continuing to watch the horror.

As the father looked towards the Nazi soldiers, he replied "be thankful......that you are not like them."

There is always something to be thankful for.

A Meaty Ephiphany

     Poke.  Poke.  Poke.  Nothing could have prepared me for what I was facing, one of the more traumatic moments of my life.  It was biology dissection, sophomore year of high school and I was the girl with the perfume bottle, only opening my eyes enough to see what I must to get a passing grade.  As much of an animal lover as I've always been, at the moment, the majority of my emotions were pure disgust at seeing the insides of anything formerly living thing.  I'd always been easily grossed out to the point I developed "mental allergies" to certain foods that had once either been alive or had been produced by something alive.    I will be eternally grateful that fate gave me Sarah as a lab partner, the only one at my table of four girls who was excited to dissect!  

     Poke. Poke. Poke.  As Sarah was prodding the muscle of the exposed frog leg, I didn't realize that things were about to get worse.  Suddenly, the ominous voice of my teacher pierced through the darkness of ignorance I was was enjoying through closed eyelids.  It was in that moment he spoke the words that brought about a life-changing realization.

                                           "Wow, look at the meat on that thing!!"

At that moment, I felt it was no coincidence that he had a mustache that so closely resembled Hitlers, as all of a sudden, pieces of understanding began to come together like a puzzle, a horrific realization.  It was a hysterical stream of thoughts that ran through my mind:

   "The meat on that thing????  Meat????  I'm looking at a frog leg - OH NO!!!!!  Thats a frog leg and people say that frog legs taste like chicken.  Chicken is meat.  They also say 'you gotta get some meat on those bones.'  No.  NO. NOOO!!!!  Meat is muscle????!!!!!!!!!!!!!

     How it took me a decade and a half of my life to realize that, I do not know.  Maybe my mind was trying to protect what my teacher, who I thought was suppose to be my advocate, had just imposed upon me.  Growing up, there were many evenings that I was the last one sitting at the dinner table until I finished my meat.  I'd wait until my Mom went to put the dirty dishrags, which I now understood were actually more like a tool for the aftermath of a meaty crime scene clean-up, in the laundry room and in a panic, try to feed my meat to my dog, a willing and happy accomplice, before my parents came back.  Or there was the time when I was little and driving on a family trip when we saw a field of cows and my Mom said "look at all that hamburger!" I cried out "hamburger?  You mean you kill the cows?," but I guess I didn't comprehend the horrific reality of the situation.  Now it all made sense, why I'd always avoided meat like other children avoided vegatables.  It didn't seem natural to me to eat muscle!

     On the outside, I think I remained as collected looking as I could during this moment of terror, though I was about ready to burst into tears.  I knew in my heart I'd discovered something horrible, I didn't have the courage to ask anyone if it was true, or the ability to use my voice at that moment!  I walked around shell shocked all day until I made it home and promptly burst into tears like a girl who'd just been dumped by her first boyfriend.

     Sixteen years have passed since this awful moment.  That is over 5,840 days since I've been "clean" or as some people say, a vegetarian.  That terrible day took away my trust of food and I became increasingly suspicious of every food that crossed my path. Over time, I have had several other food epiphanies, enough to turn me into an accidental vegan.  I know I learned a lot in high school, but the one thing I can remember is the lesson that all foods are guilty and suspicious unless proven innocent!!

The Five Minute University!

What a great and accurate video!!  I think I may have graduated from there!!  I think so much of what Fr. Guido says rings true in education today - memorization, and ultimately, remembering very little.  His description of Spanish and Economics is spot on!  I was actually talking to one of my roommates today and I mentioned something about economics and I said 'that is the only thing I remember from economics.' 

But as much as I feel that Fr. Guido's description is accurate, I also think that while we are in classes - and even memorization to a small extent, does exercise our brains where they otherwise wouldn't be.  I was thinking about math the other day.  In high school, I had to take through Pre-Calc.  To this day, I believe I have really only used addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and a very very small amount of percentage figuring (mostly estimating) in my life.  As I was teaching math to my students these past few years, I kept thinking about why they needed to know these advanced formulas or topics, and when they would even use them in real life.  I feel like the reality is, most won't.  Continuing in that line of thinking, I think that's where Montessori schools are really great because the children mainly focus on what they want, what they are drawn too.  Chances are, those areas of interest are going to be what they end up doing in later life.  However, I think that even the things we won't use help to stretch us and exercise our brain muscles.  Even the things we struggle with.  Do I use advanced math in my own life?  No.  Was it worth it to take all the way through Pre-Calc - I don't think so, I think I could have been exploring other things.  But I think it helps students to be more well-rounded and stretch their abilities when they do things that they don't love, though I think that should be in moderation!  However, I also think if a student is forced to do too much of something that they have no interest in or don't feel drawn too, school can become a turn-off and they may just shut down and disengage in all learning. 

My question this week is should we require students to take advanced classes in topics they have no interest in?  Is it valuable for them to learn things that they probably will not even use in their lives?

Writing as a Vehicle for Literacy

I think it is in the Hebert article where writing is compared to a vehicle to use for reading comprehension.  This seems a very appropriate image to describe a part writing can play in the world of literacy.  It is a way to transport information from the mind into a thought as it requires students to take something they have read and express it.  As the Keys article states 'writing has potential to foster the generation of knowledge by actively translating new meanings into verbal systems.'  Writing is almost like putting the foot to the gas pedal and taking what was read and going somewhere to it, its an action! 

As I'm writing this, I'm thinking about how our blogs do this for us and for our material.  One of the important aspects I took from the Keys, Labbo, and Hebert articles is the importance of letting students drive their own writing car, so to speak, to give them the freedom to go at the pace that they have set and on the course they want to go, to allow them to make 'personal interpretations' (Keys) and personal reactions (Hebert) of and to texts and topics.  In many ways, I feel we experience this in our blogs.  We get to process our readings and take what is personally meaningful and explore it.  Writing about the readings and materials helps me to process it and take meaning from it, to think about it, and to comprehend it.  The Keys article gives the example of science - how often, writing in this content involves such strategies as fill-in-the-blanks, etc, but does 'not often consider projecting personal interpretations, hypothesis, explanations into science writing...'  I think about how much more meaning our material has when we are given the freedom to dive in and to write about it.  If we were given fill-in's, the synthesis would remain superficial.  Each content area can benefit from having students write.  I think it takes time and teaching students how to write (Hebert), but if teachers make the investment in doing this, writing can become a powerful vehicle for students to explore and comprehend material. Writing also gives the students an understanding of what it means to be an author, and through this, as Hebert points out, they can improve their reading!

The past two years, I've done writers workshop with my students and this weeks readings have really made me reflect on how I have and should use this and other strategies as a teacher and how I can improve my students writing time to help them have a better experience and get the most out of it.  I love writers workshop time.  This past year, my students would beg to do it, and they would do it for as long as I let them, and most of them would use the time productively.  I could really relate to the Labbo article and it helped me to really reflect on how I do it and what I should do differently.  I tended to do things more hands-off than most of the things I've read about writers workshop, but it has mostly been out of fear of discouraging students, so I was a little excited when I read that article and suggested teachers should 'focus more on what the child is trying to do and less on what we are trying to teach' (Labbo).  Two years ago, when I first started using WW, I was far more structured and rigid, afraid if a student didn't have a formal outline.  This past year, I tried demonstrating and suggesting to students to use some kind of formal outline, but I wasn't as strict about it.  I let them volunteer what they wanted to share and if they wanted to share.  I tried to let them tell me more about their writing and decide what form of writing they wanted to use and how they wanted to approach it.  I feel like I can see the difference in my students desires to write.  It made a big difference allowing them to choose which tools they used that I provided.  I am thankful for the Labbo article because it helps me to be more intentional about how I approach my WW - I had already started changing some of the things I did, but out of fear, that article helps me to be intentional and confident in how I will approach it!! 

I felt like the Hebert reading was really valuable, practical, and useful for really applying to ones teaching, evidenced where it says 'practices in this report should be used by educators in a flexible and thoughtful way to support student learning' (p 5).  I thought the entire article was really good, but one thing that really stuck out to me was more the actual style of the article.  I was thinking about it compared to some of the other recent readings and I just feel like it was much more easy to read and to comprehend....I was wondering if anyone else had that experience and based on what we've learned in this course, why that might be?  :)

I guess my question for this week is focused on the Writers Workshop aspect of the reading.....from my own experience, I feel that I've learned the value and importance of giving students freedom in writing, but practically speaking, students must write a five paragraphed essay of different types in middle school and even more in high school.  Practically speaking, how do we balance freedom in writing and teaching the formalities?