This morning we had some great presentations and conversations about the idea of college readiness. What do our students need to become successful college students? I also expand this to career readiness. What do you want your future employees to have or to be able to do?

We spent a lot of time writing, and right now I am finishing this from a new location in the library. I am in love with this space! The picture I have doesn’t really do it justice, but there are areas to spread out for reading, studying, charging your various devices. LOL.

Much of my day has been spent trying to find a way to make something for an open enrollment (free!) online class. I tried a variety of apps on my phone in my endeavor, but so many of them fell short.

• Tumblr – I’ve had the app on my phone, and I know a lot of people love it for microblogging, but you can’t create a new page/blog without going to the website so I wasn’t impressed with its functionality.
• Google Drive – I love my Google Drive, but you an’t make a file public to share on the go (or at least not on the app, and going out to the desktop version of the website is clunky) so that wasn’t working for me.
• WordPress – I couldn’t create a new blog without going to the website. The app has a lot of functionality, but not being able to create a new actual website was a major issue that kept me from completely the project with WordPress.
• Google + – I was really excited about trying to use one of the new Google + communities because the look of the app is so nice, but gain, you can’t actually make a community via the app you have to go out to the website.

I finally had a lightbulb moment and reinstalled Evernote. I’m having a few sync issues with it, but it allowed me to create, completely on my phone, a notebook that I can share with anyone who has the link. You can see it here.

Ultimately do I HAVE to have the ability to do everything I want on my phone? Maybe not, but it definitely makes my life a lot easier when I want to do a lot on the go. It has me looking at my lesson plans, and thinking about what technology I want to use to provide links etc to my students. It will also factor in as I have to seriously consider what will replace my netbook. It can’t run for more than 2 hours without being plugged in. Oh netbook, you served me well.

And yet, I still make assumptions. When I pick up a chapbook of poems I assume they are probably going to be themed as that is the trend, and because of that assumption the title of said chapbook sets up a given expectation before I even open the book.

When I started reading Brenda Bowen’s chapbook Riverwalker I envisioned a book of lyrical, nature based poems. Instead I found a slim collection of poems that are observant and contemplative to nature, but not in the way I thought. Let me try to explain by using the poem that I feel is like the ars poetica of the book, “Fairy Tale.” I am going to use the poem in its entirety as I will skip quoting from others to give you a feel for the whole book via this one poem:

Fairy Tale

Jagged pot
split in two

I let go of your hand
for the grassroots level

the stones in the road
fly up beneath our bicycle tires

I make a church out of words
(someone told me to do it)

I let go of your hand
for poetry

A fairy tale can be a story with magical and imaginary beings and lands, or the phrase can be describing a situation that resembles the idealization of the fairy tale’ think fairy tale weddings and happily ever after.

The speaker of this poem made me think of the Jack and Jill story. We want Jack and Jill to find an easy solution, but this poem does not present that. The poem is sparse, and yet can be read on a variety of levels just like a fairy tale which can be for children, but whose morals can also be applied to adult life. This is a poem about choosing, perhaps, the more difficult path which is the somewhat solitary life of the poet.

This is just my attempt at interpreting this particular poem, and through it, the book as a whole. I also chose this poem to exemplify the book because of the stones. I see the poet as picking words like stones from the river, ever so carefully. The river is a place that Bowen returns to as a way to reflect back on the rest of the world.

-Riverwalker is available from Folded Word Press in print and ebook formats

• Starting with a documentary called The Woman Who Wasn’t There which was interesting, but ended in kind of an odd way. It is a very different take on some of the survivor events around 9-11
• On the book end I finished Packing for Mars via my kindle app. I really enjoy Mary Roach’s book, and this one didn’t disappoint. I love that she asks the questions that you might be thinking about, but are doubtful to ask like – how do astronauts poop in space?
• On the fiction side of things I watched the anime From Up On Poppy Hill which was a lovely period piece.
• I’m continuing to watch the occasional foreign film and most recently it was a Korean one called Castaway on the Moon. I would call it a quirky take on modern consumer life with a love story thrown in.
• On the more TV end of things I watched The Finder which was a show only on for a season before it was canceled, but it was a lot of fun to watch to be honest with you. Which, when I used to discuss movies with a friend several jobs ago who was really into movies, was just big dumb fun to watch.
• I do have a pretty big list of educational type documentaries, but I’m going to shorten the list quiet a bit and just mention the ones that stood out a bit more like Lost Angels  about skid row in LA, First Circle about foster care in Idaho, Brooklyn Castle about chess at a NY junior high, The Revisionaries about textbook language used in the Texas school systems, and I could mention more, but I’m having one of those feelings where I want to clear my last.
• So I’m gonna finish with a small movie that I found just a fun watch: Fat Kid Rules the World (even if I did catch two small editing errors, LOL).

That cleans up my list. Maybe I can actually find the time to finish some more books, and other projects now? Who says summer is a “vacation.” What have you guys been up to?

I don’t have a new poem for this week. I tried all week to write on a note I had made: dance. I brainstormed different scenarios with this, but nothing came to fruition. I’m OK with that. I have several ideas that came to me this week, however, that I’ll try to start drafting today. I also think my poem from two weeks ago (the one about the guitar) might want to be a short story. Hmmmm. Haven’t tried one of those this year.

So this week’s poem is an older one that I’ve submitted a few times, but I’m not as sure about it. I don’t know that I have shared it here before. If I did, sorry!

Sadie Hawkins

You wrote her single spaced,
single paged notes. She pictured
you begging your sister
to fold them for you
so that they were
at the height
of teenage origami art.

She dreamed you gave up
your dessert for the
panda bear stamp
that reminded her
of a CSI TV show -
how the handwriting expert
always pointed out
hesitation as a sign of forgery.

Your stamping was amateur,
lacked conviction.

On the phone you told her
you loved her so quickly
she didn’t have a chance
to try saying, “I love you, too.”

First friends for two months.
Then, the “going out”
of two weeks. The break up
was two days away
because she wanted to dance,
and you didn’t own a sport coat.

-

As always feel free to comment on my poem and/or post your own (or link) for discussion. All poems (or other genres) will be taken down one week from today.

In additional poetry news I have to give a shout out to Raymond Luczak’s How to Kill Poetry. This brilliant book does a terrific job of responding to a wide variety of poets that have come before us, and even puts a cheeky eye towards what a future poet may write. What a terrific mix. I can’t decide where to put this book in my house because I have shelves for poetry, but I also have a shelf of poetry textbooks. I could SO teach this book. Someday I hope I have the chance.

Speaking of teaching, kind of sideways, I also like to look to other creative people for discussions of their process. The documentary Brief Encounters is an excellent one about a photographer.

Look forward to seeing what you guys have been up to

As I’ve been discussing with these courses I learned a lot from teaching face to face that I took to the online version of the class I taught later. The biggest change is that the final new unit in my online class was Mixed Genres. Using the textbook, they took a week to talk about essays and a graphic novel excerpt then the next week I linked them to other mixed genre pieces which they had to write about using a multi-media approach. I loved this assignment. I had them looking at comics that had a satirical bent, memoir pieces that used fiction type elements (like dialogue), and prose poems to name a few. The projects ranged from presentations on Prezi, Google Sites, Videos etc. I’ll actually be working the multi-media approach into my classes at UNC-Charlotte for the fall as well.

When I did this unit with my face to face classes I didn’t have examples in the text books so I did a week on non-fiction and a week on cross genre pieces. I realized that my students still struggled with telling fiction from non-fiction and the terms to use (like story versus essay) so I wanted to focus more when I worked with them in the online class. I also liked how well they responded to the graphic novels (I brought in my own examples) and quite a few students in my night class wrote their best papers of the semester on graphic novels.

One thing that came out of the face to face class though was using “Freakonomics” as an example of taking non-fiction and turning it into a film. I have since used “Freakonomics” more, and it was a good way to work on the exam (to revisit literary terms) because we could watch additional segments. My online class didn’t have an exam, but what they had to do was go back to their original literary terms write-up and reflect on how their understanding of that term changed over the course of the semester. That’s another assignment I was really happy with.

I’m spending a little time on most days working on my lesson plans for the fall. I have to take what I’ve done before and translate that to fit into a new course description. I’m having a good time with it, but I also want to finish off my posts about teaching at the community college level so next week I’m going to talk about ENG-114 (Professional Writing and Reporting). Let’s see if I can do that all in one post

–poem is out of here  

This poem came out of a moment walking at the mall (can you tell! LOL), and I went with it. It has been through several handwritten revisions, and I’m still not quite sure about how the individual stanzas wrap up, or how the ending does. On my last revision I started thinking I might try a revision into a form. Any ideas what form I might have been thinking of? Please feel free to discuss my poem and/or post your own work in progress (any genre) for discussion.

I’m going to mention a few reading items real quick. 1st up is that I finished one big hulk of a book: IQ84 by Haruki Murakami. While this isn’t my favorite of his books it was an interesting read. I found myself marking quite a few places where the book itself was about the act of writing itself.

Next up is The Writer’s Chronicle which has become, over the last year, my go to writing magazine to read. Only problem? Wish it didn’t have such great articles and interviews because now I have another book I want to buy – of course!

Finally I have to mention a great poetry read: Blood Almanac by Sandy Longhorn. I took so many notes while I was reading this book. These poems have a quality to them that makes you want to slow down. I found myself reading and then re-reading. I especially loved to read many of them out loud because Sandy has a great ear for the poem.  It is hard for me to pick a favorite so I instead suggest you click through and read the samples on Anihinga’s website, and then maybe pick up a copy?

See you next week everyone!

To start I assigned a section of the textbook, and I discussed How to Read a poem as well as the “history” of poetry. There are so many different poems that I could start with (besides those in the textbook), but I do often enjoy using something by Taylor Mali since you can compare text to his performance of the text. We had in class discussions, writing assignments (academic and creative), and I discovered that my poetry “training” served me well in the classroom. I was better able to respond when a rogue question came up. I can study and teach lots of things, but the more you know really can make you a better speaker. This got me thinking about how I could use my poetic world view to teach other topics. That should pop up in other lessons I discuss as I go through other courses.

For week two I called the week The Art of Saying. I focused on thinking about the why of poetic choices. We discussed literary terms such as Denotation and Connotation. Week three was called Poetry Nuts and Bolts. Here I got into more of the literary devices: symbols, simile etc. Quite a few of my day students did their final projects by writing poems. I don’t know if they did that because it was the end of the semester, and they needed to finish their project or because they really wanted to try. Either way, I enjoyed reading their words. One of the activities I developed during this time was using a modified version of the game Scattegories. I think this is a good way to think about avoiding cliche. If I role an S and the topic is pasta do you want to be with everyone else saying spaghetti or are you going to try to find a different word so you get a point where no one else does?

I also talked about forms versus free verse briefly during the third week. I developed my linebreak exercise during this course. I won’t share it in full detail (sorry!) cause I use it for my online classes as well, but it gives you a chance to think about why an author chooses to place words in specific places.

Week four was called Sounds and Symbols. We talked about sounds and word play. Depending on the class I could go into a variety of activities. Some could be more basic or we could get into more advanced lessons thinking about how sounds actually effect you physically, and how you can use that in writing. Discussions on rhyme and rhythm also went in well here.

I’m already running out of space! But, I want to mention a few things on covering poetry in these classes. First off I was able to have more engaged discussions with my day class. Discussions were where I really saw the differences between the two classes. My day class had a better grasp on how to analyze and discuss whereas my night class either struggled or just didn’t have the desire to go beyond a base consideration of the work we were doing. I’ll address this a bit more in a later post when I talk about the final results of the class.

When I had the online class later on I only spent two weeks on poetry with them. They used the poems in the textbook along with chapters on how to read/analyze poetry. They had already spent a lot of time with literary terms so I think their ability to discuss poetry had a stronger foundation. They discussed the ones in the book for a week, and then the second week they had to do a written response. The textbook had a poetry and paintings section which I decided to use. They could either write an academic essay about how a particular presented poem and painting worked (or didn’t) together, or they could choose a painting of their own to respond to via poetry. The revisions of these were similar to prior revisions. If they did the academic they had to research and add sources. If they did the poem response I helped them revise, but I also asked them to reflect on the process of responding via poetry as part of their revision.

Sorry for the long post, but hopefully I can finish up next time with the mixed genre section before moving on to another class.

Anyone recall their early studies of poetry? In class or on their own? Is there anything you wished you had covered? Feel you missed? Best assignments etc?