mccomas, July 4, 2002 at 9:54:41 PM CEST

Reader/Writer Autobiography

Reading has always been a life-giving force for me; I suspect writing has to, but it wasn't as obvious to me as I viewed writing as a natural concurrent activity or follow up activity to reading. I remember reading voraciously as a child. In Lake City, where I lived from 4th grade until the end of 10th grade, we had a hedge of lilac bushes in our side yard. The hedge was well-developed; the bushes were probably 15 feet high. Within the hedge were spaces where a child could hide from other children, parents, and the sun. I spent many hours in those hedges, reading and dreaming of places I'd rather be, people I'd rather be, things I'd rather do. Books fueled my imagination and I remember, in particular, being partial to books with characters that wrote. Inspired by the dedication these characters devoted to their writing I also dedicated, and re-dedicated, myself to writing probably once every summer, if not more. While my writing was sporadic, my reading was not.

I do not rememer learning to read, it seems I have always known how. I know that I read well beyond my age level, using a work of adult non-fiction for a book report in 4th grade.

AUTHOR: Reben, Martha Ruth, 1911- TITLE: The healing woods, by Martha Reben [pseud.] PUBLISHER: London, Hammond, Hammond & Co. DATE: [1954] DESCRIPTION: 221 p., [4] . of plates ill., 1 map 21 cm. NOTES: Autobiographical. SUBJECT: Outdoor life. CO-AUTHOR: Rebentisch, Martha Ruth, 1911- NC3R MEMBERS: +ZNO+ ADK COLL. QH81.R285 H4

I stewed about the situation all day, ranted about it to my parents all evening. By the time I went to bed, I had not re-written a single part of the report, but I know that I had not yet made a decision. When I awoke the next morning, my course of action was crystal clear to me. Across the top of my paper, right under the place where she wrote "tell only the important parts," I scrawled in my always large and rounded penmanship:

It wasn't until I became involved with the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Marshall University in 1993 and then later with the Marshall University Writing Project in 1997 that I began to understand the place that writing held in my life. Thinking about writing as a process and a product helped me to understand that much of my life I have used writing as a way to understanding. My deliberate efforts with geometry proofs were not so much a labor of writing love, but more a labor of using the writing to thoroughly comprehend the thing I had set out to prove. All of the journals and papers that I discarded because they were messy were not wasted efforts (although they were wasted paper for which I am wholeheartedly sorry now) but drafts and pre-writings. My journaling, which I took up again in earnest around 1985, was a way of working things out--solving problems, practicing my ideas, discovering who I was.

All of my discoveries, on a personal level, have a tremendous impact upon who I am as a teacher. I believe firmly that the more one writes, the better one writes. I believe firmly that through writing people come to understand and know more than they understood or knew before the writing. I believe firmly that reading and writing are intricately connected; writing helps one to understand what one is reading, reading helps one to understand what one is writing, reading gives us more to write about, writing gives us more reading.

Lately, I have begun to wonder about the reading skills of my students. I require that students do a lot of reading prior to class periods and expect that reading to be done in order for them to participate fully in the day's activities. I know that some students find reading, at least academic reading, a difficult task...not the actual reading/decoding but the reading comprehension. I emphasize the need for ongoing education for proefssional development purposes and wonder how easy or difficult that might be for students if they struggle with making meaning of academic writing. I began reading Mosaic of Thought: Teaching Comprehension in a Reader's Workshop by Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann earlier this summer, based upon my sister's recommendation. She's a first grade teacher and has a very different perspective on reading than I do. I learned with writing, however, that assuming that students knew how to do certain things simply because they were in college was dangerous and I'm now learning that my assumptions about reading abilities are also dangerous, and wrong. As I'm reading, I'm beginning to form ideas about how to approach reading academic texts in my classes and how I can use informal writing assignments to strengthen reading comprehension strategies.

link me   
 

mccomas, July 4, 2002 at 9:28:13 PM CEST

Titles of Pieces Yet Unwritten

• The Man in the Yellow Slicker
• February Taps
• Empty Nesting

link me   
 

mccomas, July 4, 2002 at 9:23:33 PM CEST

Reading List

June

• Fiction
  • Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman by ????
• Non-Fiction
  • The Power of Writing by Peter Elbow
  • Narrative Inquiry by ???
  • A Writer's Notebook by Ralph Fletcher

July

• Fiction
  • Eden Close by Anita Shreve
• Non-Fiction
  • Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
  • Mosaic of Thought: Teaching Comprehension in a Reader's Workshop by Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann

link me   
 

mccomas, July 4, 2002 at 7:23:28 PM CEST

The Big Dipper

An essay inspired by Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury.

And, of course, the more water you dip out the more flows in. (p. 81)

Of the things I read about in Bradbury, two ideas really stood out to me. The whole notion of keeping lists (he reports keeping lists of nouns, my variation on that was to keep a list of titles of the pieces I would probably write one day). By keeping those lists, I was able to dip some water out of the well of memories I had stored, some in untouchable places. And, I discovered that Bradbury was right! As I dipped out the titles, more memories, and consequently more titles, flowed in. Since that time I have gone back and written about some of the items on the list; others remain on the list as titles only. It is perhaps one of the most productive kinds of writing I have done, yet I failed to keep up with it.

This opportunity then, to read Bradbury again (perhaps my unconscious reason for suggesting the book), shames me into acknowledging my lack of discipline in dipping out of the well. It also provides the perfect opportunity to begin dipping overflowing scoops of memories out of the well in order for other memories to flood in. While Bradbury's memories are mostly of a personal kind used as mulch (and yes, sometimes fodder) for his stories, it is just as conceiveable that teaching memories would be as appropriate for such a list as personal memories. Perhaps it is my task on this blog to begin such a list...both of personal memories and of teaching memories...of the critical incident kind? It is exactly these kind of memories that I prefer to write about, to think about. The ways in which my personal memories and my professional memories intersect openly reveal who I am as a person and as a teacher.

"I teach who I am," Parker Palmer writes (in The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life) and this is what I mean by the intersection. The point at which my personal and professional lives intersect is the very point at which I am the most real, the most truthful, the most alive. I personally like reading the stories of others that describe these points of intersection; the stories that let me see into the mind of another, to stand beside that other and see what they see, to imitate the thoughts and questions asked by the other as ways to uncover, shovel load by shovel load, the ins and outs of me.

link me   
 

mccomas, July 4, 2002 at 1:57:15 PM CEST

Seeing

An essay inspired by Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury (p. 79-80)

Then I took a long look...

I'm reminded of a long drive home from a softball game in Milton one suffocating weekend in late July two years ago (or so). It was late in the afternoon and the shadows were falling earlier each day. While half dozing I was infused with the total green-ness of my surroundings--everywhere I looked it was green. I looked to my right and saw green grass and followed that green grass with my eyes until I saw green trees and I followed those green trees with my eyes as they stretched to the sky and bent over slightly at the top to cover the road and kiss the leaves of trees on the other side also bending over slightly to cover the road. I followed those kissed leaves down to my left until they blended into the green grass on the left side of the car. Together, all this green created a carpet of softness to tread upon and a canopy overhead to shade and protect us. It occurred to me then that I never, ever look up.

I am always looking at what is right in front of my face or I look down or I look inside. By only looking at what is right in front of my face, I miss the wholeness of things--the bigger meanings (such as trees into canopies)--and I lose my perspective of where I fit into my surroundings. By only looking down I can never see where I'm going only how I'm getting there. And, by only looking inside, I dwell far too much on feelings and thoughts--the abstractness of my life--instead of things concrete and tangible, things with density and mass.

Two years ago in late July I was determined to start looking up and outward. I did, for a while, but I've forgotten how to do that. Bradbury is talking about consciously doing that every single day while writing whatever comes to mind. He revisits places in his mind and writes about what he sees in those places; he revisits people in his mind and writes about what those people look like; he writes about the concrete and by doing that he is able to explain the abstract. I'm vowing again, today--right here in this blog, to start looking up and outward.

To my left is a pile of laundry, unsorted, providing an interesting collection of colors and shapes. If I squint my eyes just a little, the pile blurs and looks just like an impressionistic painting with no specific form and shape but endless possibilities. The wall in front of me contains six tiny nail holes where things used to hang (and here Bradbury would probably try to recall what used to hang there and then describe them). There is also a heart shape with swatches of red and blue fabric tied around the metal frame with a bright red ribbon at the top which serves as a way to hang the heart on the small brass cuphook screwed into the wall. Above the cloth heart is a cross-stitched sampler, a gift to me from a friend. The sampler is on a cream colored fabric with blue threads forming the shapes of four houses, red thread for the alphabet surrounding the houses on all four sides and red thread creating the outermost border in the shape of a checkerboard. The sampler is doublematted (red and blue) in a walnut frame with each side of the frame extending below or beyond the side it is framing, forming and "x" in each corner of the frame. The entire piece is covered with glass. To the left of the sampler and the cross heart is another piece of work, a light blue square of card stock with two holes punched in the uppermost right hand corners to support a dark blue ribbon used to hang the piece on a nail much to large for this wall or this piece. The card has red handprints, one right hand and one left hand, and white paint surrounding the handprints like cumulous clouds on the first day of summer. At the bottom and slightly to the left of center is printed: K a t i e. Standing, I turn this piece over, looking for a date and realize I have not dated this work and am not certain when it was made. Kindergarten (1985)? First grade (1986)? I make a note to ask Katie as she remembers everything.

Ah, Bradbury has forced me to look and to see and to describe the results of this visual feast I have fed on this morning. It occurs to me that my interest in narrative and stories will benefit from this kind of exercise. If I want to write stories based on the narratives of people's lives and experiences, then I must be able to describe, not tell, so that my readers can stand where I am standing and see what I am seeing.

link me