Quiet Day

The week before Thanksgiving, I only had two students in my class: Mykhi and Saleha.

We ate Carma's cookies and read aloud a selection from Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad and talked about college. Saleha wants to go to Harvard. Mykhi wants to play football for the Terps; he also does a killer robot voice.

The Robot Bard of The Cyberiad

I found out that most of Saleha's family is still in Iran, and Mykhi's father played football for Notre Dame. His parents are a little more than 10 years older than me.

They really loved The Cyberiad, although they said at first that it couldn't be a real book because it has pictures in it. "That's the great thing about college," I said. "Your books have pictures and you only have class one day a week."

I lied a little bit. For the greater good.

The most interesting part about Lem's book was the nonsense language. It led us a to a surprisingly deep conversation about the nature of words, the source of the universe, and God vs. robots.

At the end of class, I spent some time with each of them developing the story-lines for their spooky tales. Mykhi's decided to do his as a play. Saleha is torn between poetry or prose, but I think she'll settle on prose.

Happy Halloween

Getting serious... Weeks 6, 7, and 8.

In week six, I introduced our long-term project: Spooky stories! The genre of supernatural fiction tied in (somewhat superficially) to the overall theme of Modern Myths, but more importantly it was an idea the kids were really interested in. 

I led us in a guided meditation and free-write to start us off. It was a dark and stormy day... Actually, it was slightly overcast and about 60 degrees, but it looked quite cold outside. I lined them up at the windows and asked them to consider first the immediate aspects of the environment (the cloudy skies, the breeze on the tree-branches, the belching industrial pipes and the crowded parking lot). Then we moved to smaller things (the way the clouds moved, the individual leaves on the trees, the squirrels among among the cars), and finally ended by imagining all of the unseen life outside the classroom (the people in the buildings, the invisible birds in the trees, the innumerable creatures and bacteria in the dirt and grass of the football field).

Then we read a few supernatural-themed poems: "Because I could not stop for death" (Dickinson), "Ghost House" (Frost), "Annabelle Lee" (Poe).

Another time, I split them into four groups and we acted out "The Witches' Spell" from Act 4 of Macbeth. I asked each of them to put a different spin on the performance and the results were hilarious. Not much writing this week, but definitely a lot of thinking and discussion... I can't wait to start the projects.

These are the weeks I began to lose students... I didn't want to take it personally, because as one child's mother explained, there "seems to be a college-level amount of work assigned to sixth-graders." But it still hurt. My first class went from fifteen to nine students. It seems that parents and teachers believe Creative Writing should be reserved for "a future year in [students'] scholastic training...to get the most out of it."

For all my soap-boxing, I think they have a point. But if my child had the opportunity to write and to develop the kind of advanced literary thinking I've been trying to cultivate in these students--I don't know that I would pass that up, even if it meant missing a few sections of Egyptian mythology in sixth grade social studies. Soap-box: dismounted.

Weeks 4 and 5: Aspects of a story

In week 4, we focused on characterization. For the first three weeks of the course, I had had each student write down a different fact or character trait each day. By the fourth week, there were three descriptors for each student.

I wrote them down on index cards and left a blank spot for the students to fill in. Then we wrote stories based on the our facts. At the end of the class, they guessed whose card they'd written on. For example:

This character...

is an accomplished pianist;

his/her favorite season is fall;

he/she loves Chopin (the composer, not the writer);

and ___________. 

Natalie received this card about Leah, and filled in for her blank: has a sad love of squash.

We had a discussion about what makes a realistic character and how to avoid "stock characters" (action figures). 

In week 5, we focused on words--not wasting words, and the importance of compelling dialogue.

To this end we read "The Poison Tree" (William Blake), "The Haunted Palace" (Edgar Allen Poe) and "The Mock Turtle's Story" by Lewis Carrol. The "Mock Turtle" was a huge hit--they picked up some of the puns I'd missed. And the introduction of the mythical creatures into the class's pool of knowledge resulted in some very interesting stories later on, as some students took up the idea of Gryphons and blended beasts in their long projects (a few of which are almost Dr. Moreau-esque, to my horrified delight).

"Now, at our school, they had, at the end of the bill, 'French, music, and washing..."

"You couldn't have wanted it much," said Alice; "living at the bottom of the sea."

"I couldn't afford to learn it," said the Mock Turtle, with a sigh. "I only took the regular course."

"What was that?" inquired Alice.

"Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied; "and then the different branches of Arithmetic--Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision."

"I never heard of 'Uglification,'" Alice ventured to say. "What is it?"

The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. "Never heard of Uglifying!" it exclaimed. "You know what to Beautify is, I suppose?"

"Yes, said Alice doubtfully: "It means--to--make--anything--prettier."

"Well, then," the Gryphon went on, "if you don't know what to uglify is, you are a simpleton."

Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it: so she turned to the Mock Turtle, and said, "What else had you to learn?"

"Well, there was Mystery," the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers,--"Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling--the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week: he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils."

"Nice" does not suffice

or Week three: Roadblocks.

So what does a writer do when he has nothing to write about? I was slightly shocked to learn that my sixth graders--despite having mouths like motors and more pep than a can of Mr. Pibb--very quickly ran out of things to write about. Writing time dissolves almost instantly into whisper time which of course grows to talking time.

So this week we worked on techniques for overcoming writer's block.

To start off with, we told a straightforward and well-known tale--this is not the time for the Odyssey, but the encounter with the cyclops works very well. We broke it down into its basic narrative arc and then moved on to discussing Freytag's pyramid, mostly importantly trying to find a definition for a story's "climax."

I asked them to picture a group of mountain climbers, and (long story short) we decided that the climax was the peak of the mountain--big surprise. But trying to describe why that had to be the climax was a much more interesting discussion, and in the end it was the fact that there was nowhere else to go--in other words, that an inevitability had been established--that made the peak the climax.

After that we played the ABC game. I suppose you could just as well call it the 123 game or the character-emotion-location game. It's just what the third name would suggest: each person takes three scarps of paper and writes on each a character, an emotion, and a location, respectively. The scraps are then drawn randomly from the three different piles, and we wrote group stories based off of the results.

It was exciting to see how the point of view of a story and the six spots of the pyramid--exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement--formed a story's skeleton, and how the pyramid could be a cure for the common writer's block. (Might still be in Mad Men frame of mind. Hope I'm not the only one.)

If you couldn't think of where you were going with your story, or if you got bored, or if you just didn't like what you were doing, you could start writing a different step. It could be a sentence or a paragraph or five pages but when you came back to what you were doing before, you'd be fresher and you'd understand better what you were trying to say.


And our "Writer's Life" series continued: this week, Revisions! We'll see how many poems I get back...

Oh, right: Meet Miss Osborn

I realized that unlike Alex, in his awesome first post, I forgot to introduce myself.

My name is Katie Marie Osborn and I'm also a Writing Seminars student at Johns Hopkins University. I'm originally from Carmichael, CA (a 'burb of Sacramento that lies on the west side of the American river), but I have many special Baltimore places in my heart thanks to friends, employers, and professors who've helped me get to know the city.

I have a fiction concentration within the Seminars, but I've also studied American and European literature, politics and public policy, and philosophy. I'm graduating in December and have little or no idea what I'm doing after that, but I have a feeling it's going to be something in community development or public policy.

I am so excited about our project at Roland Park Elementary and Middle School. I think it's critically important--at least it was for me--to begin to see writing as something that can be done outside of what you do in school, something that's actually fun and creative and relaxing and revealing.

Sixth grade is when I first got to know some of my favorite writers: Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allen Poe, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Lewis Carroll. 

My goal with my students is to look beyond their middle school "Primers" at the quality children's literature  out there. 

So far we've done pretty well! I'm having so much fun!

Dali with Sixth-Graders

Week Two: Exercises in Ekphrasis

In our second week we tackled some pretty weighty questions: What is art? What is the point of it? What do you want to say with your art?

To show how a person's own history affects the way he interprets a piece of art, we read the myth of Icarus (I typed it up very quickly; they were not impressed with my ill-proportioned sketch of the Minotaur), then we looked at Peter Bruegel's painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," and finally we read William Carlos William's poem that addresses Bruegel's painting (also "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"):

According to Brueghel

when Icarus fell

it was spring

a farmer was ploughing

his field

the whole pageantry

of the year was

awake tingling

near

the edge of the sea

concerned 

with itself

sweating in the sun

that melted

the wings' wax

unsignificantly

off the coast

there was

a splash quite unnoticed

this was

Icarus drowning

I think that a lot of them could identify with Icarus, and I was incredibly impressed when someone in my first class connected the painting with Aesop's fable about the gnat and the rhinoceros that we had read the week before.

And as I intended, the poem inspired a debate about William Carlos Williams in general. I didn't know it, but they had just read "The Red Wheelbarrow," one of my personal favorites, a poem which did not impress several of my students.

"I could have written that," one of them said.

I talked about how for me, just an image or a series of images (the red wheelbarrow, the white chickens, the raindrops) can evoke a whole train of thought. I tried to put us in the mind of the farmer plowing the field below Icarus.

"I don't think it's fair for him to talk about that other painting," someone else said. "The painter might not agree with what he said."

The whole conversation about the nature of art--our role as writers and artists, the responsibility of the writer, the creative process--was fascinating and revealing and I hope I made the kids realize that writing isn't a chore, but rather an art form, just like painting and music and dance. Its rules and limits make it all the more creative because the writer has to work within a set framework to produce something unique.

Anyway, they had fun writing about the paintings I gave them--Chagall, Dali, and anonymous Chinese calligraphy.

Their creativity was through the roof! And this week their "Life of a Writer" homework is to think of a natural phenomenon they don't understand. You'll see the awesome things they came up with (and their explanations!!) in my next post.   :)

The tortoise or the owl?

or, Week one: Getting to know you, getting to know all about you...

From the moment I stepped onto the Number 61 bus outside 7-Eleven in Charles Village, I knew I was in for it.

At least I'd gotten on the right bus! But I barely had time to pat myself on the back before the bus took off with a thundering lurch, slamming me into the change receptacle. I felt tiny bones in my feet cracking. I felt unbalanced, trying to feed my nickels and dimes into the tiny slot, and then I felt uncertain as I stepped away, my $1.40 deposited but no receipt in sight. And as I sat down behind the driver, I felt a green string of snot drip down my nose and balance, threatening, imminent, on my upper lip as I pulled out my phone to track my progress on the journey to Deepdene Road.

In short, it was one of my most poised, elegant, and proudest moments. I was a teacher.

In Miss Osborn's (I say again: Miss Osborn's!) class this semester, we'll be focusing on myths and fairy tales. We began with a discussion about fables: Why is a fable different from other myths? What role do fables play in our lives, as children and as we get older? What can we learn from them to apply to other kinds of stories?

Both classes really took to the idea of animals standing in for human values. Aesop's portrayal of a fox as cunning and manipulative (if not, according to some students, downright evil; a distinction I tried but apparently failed to illustrate), an owl as wise and old (like me, one student rather preemptively asserted), and a turtle as stable, slow and prudent (if a little reserved). Afterwards, I realized I'll probably fall into one of these over the course of the semester: An artful manipulator of the sixth-grade horde; a patient and wise guide or mentor (ha!); or a rolling, unstoppable force unto myself, moving us at a slow but steady pace through the western canon from Aesop to Barth.

Then we moved on to "popcorn" story-telling, an unqualified success.

The part of class I'm most excited about, though, is a little feature I like to call "Life of a Writer." At the end of every week, my students' homework is to emulate one specific trait of a writer. This week, I asked the students to "notice things" as a continuation of our popcorn story. We talked about how important little things are, the difference you can make with the details you use to paint a picture.

I wanted to, but didn't feel comfortable in the public high school setting, have them write "God is in the details!" across the tops of their folders.

Will have to come up with an alternate expression for next week.

Signing off for now, and looking forward to tell you about the no-doubt amazing (and considering this is Baltimore, bizarre and possibly unpublishable) things my sixth-graders notice,

-katie marie