The End Of Homework?

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hillman students 3I received this email from a great high school English teacher the other day. In it, she wrestles with the difference between assigning homework and having her students live a writing life that involves work outside the confines of the classroom. At the end of this post, I attach a portfolio specification sheet that describes the kind of work that her students are doing, for context and for anyone who is interested. Here is her email:

So, with my senior classes, I did a warm up today (which took up the whole class, not a problem) where I asked them their opinions of the French president’s proposal to ban homework for all elementary and junior high age children.

You can imagine – many made compelling arguments in support of the abolition  of homework. They reasoned that they would be less stressed, more productive in the things they actually loved, and one student cited the Finnish model of education (which I need to read more about)…

Then one senior looks at me point blank at the end of the discussion and says, “So why do you make us write logs every weekend and do projects outside of school? Why are you part of the problem?”

What a moment! Silence drained the room.

I came back with some pretty valid responses, if I say so myself, but I left the conversation full of contradictory thoughts –

I stand by what we are doing more than I have ever stood by anything I’ve done in the classroom. As a result of these new methods, they are stronger and better thinkers, speakers and writers. There is no doubt of that!

But, I can’t help but wonder, how would you have answered that senior boy’s question if you had been sitting in the classroom and where do you stand on the abolition of homework? Do you feel the classroom should be changed in such a way that all logs, essays, projects (however awesome they are) should be done during regular school hours?

Am I part of the problem?

Here is my response:

Great question posed by the student! The distinction that I make is that our goal within the class is to design meaningful work that breaks down the barriers between classroom and the world. This means that the work that we are doing should inspire passion and interest that makes the work far more important than just doing it for a class. The work that we do in school should be personally meaningful. We should want it to be a part of our lives, part of what we do, part of the way that we see and interact with the world. Most traditional homework does not meet this criteria.
Second answer that I give, when confronted with this issue with my students, is that in order to become really good at something, we need to practice it. Practice involves meaningful and difficult rituals and routines that we do consistently and mindfully over time. This means that the practices cannot just happen in the confines of a classroom. They need to happen at other times in our learning lives as well. The key is that these practices need to be meaningful. We need to feel over time that we are developing, becoming stronger, getting better. These practices should enrich our understandings, the way that we see the world. These practices should enable us to do and think things that we have not done and thought before.

The kind of question that the student asked is a perfect opening for a work conversation around what it means to be involved in a discipline. How do we live our lives in ways that enable us to develop skill in something and to understand the world in deeper, more nuanced ways? Also, I tell my students that if the work of the class is not meeting this criteria, we need to sit down and work together to make it so. That planning meeting can be one of the most productive and enlightening experiences of the year for all concerned!

Here is a specification sheet for a writing-based portfolio. It intentionally pushes students to work as writers in four distinct ways – writing critically about what they read; writing many drafts of stories, poems, plays, essays, speeches, etc.; reflecting in writing about their life and their work; and asking questions and researching those questions in interesting ways. I have found that this kind of portfolio challenges the traditional practices of homework, putting the responsibility more on the student and connecting the work of the class in genuine ways to the lives of the students.hillman students 2

Portfolio Specifications

Episode #1 – Space with David Sokoloff

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david sokoloffWelcome to the first ever episode of The Craft! This podcast is dedicated to all things teaching, learning, and school. It’s a place to celebrate the amazing things that are happening in our schools, to unravel the complexities, and to get to know the folks that make learning happen every day – teachers, students, parents, administrators, legislators, activists. The hope is that The Craft is a small cog in a larger vehicle pushing us forward as a society.

See the guy in the picture with his arms raised? That’s David Sokoloff. Fourth year teacher, teaching in a large, comprehensive public high school in Philadelphia. He is a thinker, a doer. He cares deeply about teaching and learning. He loves his students. He’s frustrated by the current state of affairs. He wants to do better. He wants us all to do better. In this episode, you get to know David, one of many, many teachers in the School District of Philadelphia who are doing interesting and meaningful work with their students every day, in the midst of rooms that don’t lock, lack of heat, absence of technology, overcrowding, and lowest common denominator curriculum. We talk about how painting houses in the summer led him into teaching. We talk about what keeps him in teaching and what he wishes schools could be.

Every episode of The Craft has a theme. The theme for this episode is Space. David and I dig into this idea of Space as it relates to teaching, learning, and school: the classroom as space; the possibility of brick and mortar schools disappearing in the next 50 years; the virtual space in education; the need to claim a space as a teacher in order to do meaningful work. We talk about it all.

We also talk about a recent report by the Center for Green Schools that claims that it will take approximately $270 billion dollars to repair our nations schools. You can find a Salon article about this issue here.  We end the show in true craft style by talking about a recent email that I received from a high school English teacher. Her seniors are having a tough time working in groups on a project that they are doing around Brave New World. Opened a perfect opportunity for David and I to talk about the need to develop the skills of working in groups with our students, and the different techniques we use to support that skill development in the classroom. You can jump over here to see the email and the response that I wrote back with a handy Group Work Checkpoint that can be used to guide students in evaluating the effectiveness of the group as they work together.

As always, I want to hear from you! Let me know what you think of the podcast. We’re just getting started here so your feedback is much appreciated. I want to make The Craft as interesting and useful as possible to as many people as possible.

Keep learning, keep teaching, keep honing your craft. david sokoloff 2

A big shout out to Chris Perrin, the DJ behind the music of Perrin & Tonic that is featured on The Craft. Check him out: https://soundcloud.com/chrisperrin

 

 

The Arts Should Rise Again!

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Just when you think the arts are disappearing from public education, they emerge in interesting ways and in important places, proving that Federal and state legislation cannot keep the arts from being an important part of a child’s and a teacher’s learning life. I make this assertion not to support the incredibly constraining law-making and short-sidedness of our legislators. It is not meant to appease the real and justified concern that students, parents, teachers, and administrators have about an education bereft of art both as a concept and a skill. Instead, what I would like to do is discuss a few surprising ways that art, more specifically artistic habits of mind and body, bubble up and demand attention in a child’s school day and in a teacher’s work.

Another way that I could put this is that the more traditional or established ways of thinking about doing art are disappearing from schools: painting, sculpting, drawing. And even with this alarming void that is ever widening in the curriculum that most of our students experience across the country, the habits of mind and body of an artist, perhaps because of this increasing lack of a chance to do art, find other ways to manifest in children and teachers. They simply will not be ignored.

By artistic habits of mind and body, I mean imaginative thinking and acting. By imaginative thinking and acting, I mean the ability, the need really, to create secondary worlds as a means for exploring what is and what could be. While there are certainly other ways to define artistic habits, this piece will focus specifically on how students and teachers express creative selves in school settings and also express a real need to do so for themselves as learning human beings. My hope is that we as educators, administrators, and legislators can pay closer attention to what this all means.

I am reminded of the third grade boy that walked up to me in the hallway. His left hand was on top of his head, upside down, with his fingers flailing around. He stood right in front of me, looking up at me, I said, ‘Hi.’ He smiled, ‘I have an alien on my head.’ He flitted his fingers around for emphasis. I asked him what the alien was doing. The boy smiled again, ‘starving.’ He giggled and jostled his way into the classroom.
A colleague and I teach a university seminar entitled ‘Power of Play: Theater and Learning.’ In this course we explore the intersection of improvisation and learning. We do this through playing improvisational games, developing understandings of thorny contemporary issues through process drama, and expanding our sense of who we are as writers through collaborative writing experiments. We explore the big question: How and what do we learn through the act of improvisational play? Students come to this course from wide and seemingly disparate disciplines: chemistry, education, psychology, theater, math, political science, sociology. There is a balance of sophomores, juniors, and seniors and the occasional lucky first year student who finds a way in. Over the course of the semester, the students share many realizations with us. One thing a majority of the students always state is how much they have missed and love playing. They often lament the fact that their other courses aren’t more playful in the way that they explore concepts and develop skills. They express joy and a sense of freedom from the need that improvisation requires to trust an impulse, take a risk, make a partner look good, and work at the top of one’s intelligence.

Recently, I have been receiving requests from schools to conduct workshops on improvisation. Administrators see a need for it for their teachers and also for their students. When I tell them that I like to begin these workshops with four rules of improvisation – say yes…and, trust your impulse, make your partner look good, and work at the top of your intelligence – they light up. ‘Yes! That is what we are missing and exactly what we need.’

So kids are being guerrilla artists, creating secondary worlds in school hallways. College students are begging for college classes that push them to create new versions of themselves. Schools are spending precious funds to encourage their teachers to think and act outside of themselves and to create supportive risk-taking classrooms through improv. All of this imaginative thinking and acting is happening during a climate of reduced funding for art classes, scripted curriculum, hyper-tracking, races to the top, and over-scheduled kids. This bureaucratic din has a tendency to drown out the simple message of this piece and what is at the heart of learning and the success of our children and our society.

These elementary and college students, teachers, and administrators are our barometer in terms of the learning climate within our schools and colleges. They are showing us whether their school climates are actually enabling them to learn and to teach. Right now, students are telling me that their schools are essentially task spaces with little connection to the imaginative lives of children and youth. By task spaces, I mean classes that are designed around discreet lessons; right and wrong answers; decontextualized activities; and worksheets that do not take into account the link between the imagination and learning. A student in my Power of Play class synthesizes this phenomenon nicely, “I have been thinking back on the various chemistry courses I have taken…I feel that it is a subject that easily falls into the ‘this is right, this is wrong’ attitude. I realize I shied away from courses that handed me a power point and had the attitude that I needed to learn that and find the answers to my questions in books.” In addition, these kinds of learning environments do not take into account the skills that our students must have in order to be successful in the 21st Century workplace. According to experts from fields ranging from education, technology, demographics, and health, the following skills will be essential if one is to gain meaningful employment in the workplace of the future:
• Sense making
• Social intelligence
• Novel and adaptive thinking
• Cross cultural competency
• Computational thinking
• New Media Literacy
• Transdisciplinarity
• Design mindset
• Cognitive load management
• Virtual collaboration
In my experience, visiting with and working in both public and private k-12 schools, the design for learning is not trending in a way that would develop these skills. Instead, learning is being narrowly constructed through assessments based on quizzes and tests, privileging memory over convergent and divergent thinking. Knowledge is defined as discreet bits of information communicated on worksheets. Subjects are still artificially separated. Risk taking is often punished through grading. Group work is avoided because students don’t know how to do it. As I describe this reality for many students and teachers, it feels so clichéd, but it is true. Perhaps we need to keep writing it until it doesn’t happen anymore.

One pressure that is demanding a change in our schools is the current economic ‘crisis’ and the supposed dip in America’s global competitiveness. Instead of opening up and thinking differently, legislation and schools return to rigid, wrong-headed basics instruction that belies current research on the brain and learning theory. This knee-jerk reaction results in evaluating students too early and too often and creating an atmosphere where there are winners and losers when it comes to children having rich, meaningful learning environments in schools. And we can’t forget that with this ‘sky is falling mentality,’ more often than not the first classes that gets jettisoned are art and music with gym and recess following close behind, predicated on the wrongheaded belief that kids need more time learning how to read and compute in ways that won’t take root and will not build 2020 skills. We design mid-terms with ten true/false questions, five short answers, and one essay question. We limit our students’ ways to demonstrate understandings of concepts and skills to weekly quizzes and monthly tests. Projects are few and far between and do not focus on teaching kids how to work in groups. The focus is on grades and numbers instead of developing the metacognitive skills that our children must have in the 21st century.

While there are schools that are designing learning around challenges, goals, projects, essential questions, and big ideas, the truth is that many schools are not. These schools are where the majority of our students are going to graduate, need jobs, and ultimately shape our future. I would contend that the teachers within these schools want to teach with 2020 skills in mind. What is infuriating and ironic is that the people that champion the skills of entrepreneurialism and utilized them in order to get where they are today – think Bill Gates – are the same people that are now marshaling their considerable wealth to pay legislators, states, and cities to mandate an educational environment that is shallow, punitive, metric-heavy, and meaning-less, based mainly on a rose-tinted class view of what was.

Just the other day, I was sitting with a teacher, talking about the student-teacher that he is mentoring this semester. He realized that a good portion of this student-teacher’s own K-12 school experience was informed and influenced by No Child Left Behind. In front of me, he began to connect the dots in terms of this student-teacher’s penchant for standing in front of the students and lecturing at them, for designing low order thinking worksheets, and for evaluating student learning solely by quizzes and tests. It was like a light went on in his head, “Of course! He’s doing what he experienced himself as a student.” The teacher went on to tell me that he also noticed that the student teacher had a difficult time problem solving and often would ask him if he had done something right as opposed to how he could do something well. Old habits die very hard, especially when they are woven into the fabric of your 13 years of schooling.

When that third grader came up to me with an alien on his head, I felt like he was telling me, “I’m keeping learning interesting.” He was also showing me how it is instinctual to use his body when he is communicating something to me. My college students keep reminding me that they appreciate learning experiences where they get to explore the big idea before getting down to the nitty-gritty. They want to play and act imaginatively because it allows their brains to work the way that they are supposed to. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Homo Sapiens is that our bodies evolved over time to be upright and to look out over the horizon. This is possibly the most natural position for us to take. Our bodies are erect and our eyes are looking forward and out, alert to what is coming over the horizon, ready to move. Most of our classes are designed with this understanding being the furthest from our minds. Students come in and sit down. The only movement that happens is the constant shifting from discomfort. And then we wonder why starting in upper elementary grades, students express frustration and sometimes dread at going to school.

A month or so ago, I ran an improv workshop for a high school World Languages department. They had just finished giving and grading mid-term exams. They were understandably tired, physically, mentally, and emotionally. By the end of the hour and a half session, to a teacher, they were laughing, eyes wide, out of breath from wooshing or dying a dramatic death. And when the time was up, they wanted to do more and find ways to keep doing it. I heard one teacher say, “We need this.”

We do need this. Not because there have been a series of double-blind experiments on it. Not because it will help us race to the top. Not because there is pressure from outside donors to make it happen. We need to do this because we are human and it is in our nature. We need to reclaim those impulses that get tamped down by standardized tests, constant connectivity, and scripted curriculum, because I would argue that our children’s success as learners and therefore our success as a society depends on it.

As a true testament to the human spirit, even in the midst of this cognitive and pedagogic time of dissonance, our students and teachers keep reminding us of how we should be teaching and learning. It is deep in our bones, deep in our brains. We would be wise to listen and change.

Warping the Traditional Author’s Note

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A great ending to writing a piece is crafting a clever author’s note to go along with it. I tend to have my students write these whenever they are going to publish a piece of their writing. Author’s notes can sometimes be rather dull and formulaic, but there are some interesting and fun ways to write author’s notes that students enjoy and that push them to be strategic and artful with their writing. Here are a few ways to write author’s notes.

Idea # 1: Author’s Note as Cento

The Cento is a form of poetry where the writer pulls lines and phrases from other poems and puts them together to create a new poem. Have your students do this with their own writing! Have them go in and pull great lines and surprising phrases and have them think strategically about how they may want to put them together in the form of a wild author’s note. When you do this, you get something like this:

Delight I invoke, Run down, between ocean and gorge to myriads of transcendence in the star-flash of the underbellies of blue cars and other worlds that float off like foam Into the sea.

Or this:

Girl in water

bottle section(better

suited for light

around the edges)

developing a tendency

 to make the

unbearable tedium of

 regular writing. As

specified in Tour

Guide, this is

her second workshop.

An equation for

this exists: 15 + 240 =

this girl(me) at

Cliveden. The figures

change from year to year.

These two Centos were built out of lines and phrases that the students pulled from the stories that they had been writing over the course of a short story unit.

Idea #2: Author’s Note as Remix

Another way to create an interesting author’s note is to dig through the writing and find quirky and funny things that it says about the writer. Remix that material into an author’s note, like this:

Leah is someone with no rhythm. She hates Remax commercials. She has never traveled to Missouri and wishes never to go there…EVER. She likes jet planes, especially when flying to Europe (where, I forgot to mention, she also has never lived). She has heard the “then there was light” story too many times to count, but wonders when there was water. Maybe her next novel will analyze that. Leah did not write “The History of Anonymity.” She has, however, written the defunct book, “Swimming for Dummies.” She is furious that the publishers did not consider it. She currently has “writers not,” a mentality similar to “writers block.” We hope (or do not hope) to see her work again soon.

Or something like this:

Nick feels like croaking on in the morning on the way to school. His mother tries to play the Dixie Chicks and roll down the window. This makes Nick’s eyes go cross.

Good author’s notes can be short and sweet.

Idea #3: Author’s Note as Collaborative Writing

Get students and teachers together in groups of three or so and have them build author’s notes for each other collaboratively. Each writer gets out a piece of paper. Make the constraint three words and pass, meaning that each writer puts down three words and then passes the paper to the next writer. That writer picks up the author’s note from where it left off. Keep passing the papers around, writing three words at a time until you get something like this:

Eli envies the deaf, wears chucks, and hates Axe body spray. Currently he is adrift in a jar, buried under a rock, with the glass painted black. He’d love to talk about his family dynamic, but thinks it might be a bit of a personal subject at this juncture.

Or this:

This long wage of vast palette, which builds its range by adoption of hues in Tijuana of futuristic squirrels. Holy hell’s bells avenge Baltic buffoons. Eyes like saucers let me go! Tattooed tramp! My Mom’s got nothing but leaky boots.

Idea #4: Author’s Note as Identity Theft

Have your students go online and Google themselves. Have them jot down all kinds of interesting things that they learn about people that have their same name. Then have them write an author’s note using all of that information. You’ll get something like this:

Leif Gustavson sometimes lives in Massachusetts. He actively uses his Dropbox to collect electronic music under the artistic name Leify-Greenz. When not in Massachusetts, he returns to Kyle, Saskatchewan. While pursuing his Master’s Thesis in Cognitive Science, he won the Children’s Wish Foundation Home Lottery and secretly wished that his first name was Thor.  He has a propensity to take pictures with his shirt off. Leif often eats lunch at a shelter set up by the Spencer Emergency Management Agency at Knox Trail Junior High School.

The point of all of these forms is to warp the conventional author’s note, to push students to think and act divergently and convergently about the form. I would start this experiment by sharing a traditional author’s note or two with the students. Talk about the craft: what makes them tick? What are the moves that the writer is making in them? Then I would say, “For our author’s note, let’s warp the form a bit” and share these other ways of creating interesting, artful author’s notes. This way, they get the conventions of a traditional author’s note and then can twist it in fun and challenging ways.

All of the examples, with the exception of the identity theft one, are real author’s notes crafted by middle and high school students.

 

Interesting Books and Websites to Encourage the Writer in All of Us

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bk-old_faithful  what is poetrypoetry everywhereinside out

writers desk

 

 

 

 

Over the years, teachers, students, and I have assembled a running list of books and websites that encourage us to be writers with each other. These books and websites contain great writing experiments to try, essential information and guides for form, the keys to the language of writing we want to develop and share, and the names of fellow writers and teachers that we should be connected to. Click on any of them to explore. Chime in with other suggestions, and I’ll be sure to add them in.

Books on writing with kids

Poetry Everywhere by Jack Collom

Handbook of Poetic Forms – Ron Padgett

The Alphabet of the Trees – Christian McEwen

June Jordan’s Poetry for the People – Lauren Muller

Inside Out by Dan Kirby

The Adventures of Dr. Alphabet: 104 Unusual Ways to Write Poetry in the Classroom & the Community By Dave Morice

The List Poem: A Guide to Teaching & Writing Catalog Verse By Larry Fagin

Moving Windows: Evaluating the Poetry Children Write By Jack Collom

Talking to the Sun: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems for Young People By Kenneth Koch & Kate Farrell

True Notebooks : A Writer’s Year at Juvenile Hall by Mark Salzman

Rose, Where Did You Get that Red? – Kenneth Koch

Sleeping on the Wing – Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell

What is Poetry – Daniel Kane

Third Mind – Tonya Foster and Kristin Prevallet

The Whole Word Catalogue – Rosellen Brown

The Oulipo Compendium – Harry Mathews, et. al.

Old Faithful – Christopher Edgar and Ron Padgett

Writers talking about how and why they write books

The Writer’s Desk by Jill Krementz

The Writers Notebook edited by Howard Junker

Great websites and organizations

Teachers and Writers – www.twc.org

826 Valencia – http://www.826valencia.org/

Pennsounds – http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/

Charles Bernstein and Bernadette Mayer Writing Experiments – http://writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/experiments.html

Category: Being a writer

Words To Write By

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There are a number of writers that have made lists of maxims for writing that they use to help guide them, push them, encourage them to get words down on the page. As part of the writing-based curriculum, I share these maxims with my students. I print them out and have the students read them, picking out the maxims that most resonate with them, surprise them, inspire them, or just plain confuse them. We talk about the maxims that are chosen guided by the question, ‘How can these maxims help us with our writing craft?’ This kind of craft conversation enriches the language of writing and helps to create the kind of mindset needed to approach the blank page and to get stuff down that has potential. These maxims also help students see the playfulness of the act of writing, always a good thing.

I have collected a few of these kinds of lists below. Two are from Jack Kerouac. One is from Allen Ginsberg. One is from Emma Coates, Pixar’s Story Artist. Let them fuel you. Let them fuel your students. Put them to work in your writing-based classroom.

Jack Kerouac’s Rules for Spontaneous Prosekerouac

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

ginsbergHere are Allen Ginsberg’s Mind Writing Slogans

“First Thought is Best in Art, Second in Other Matters.”
— William Blake

             I Background (Situation, Or Primary Perception)

  1. “First Thought, Best Thought” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  2. “Take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts.” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  3. “The Mind must be loose.” — John Adams
  4. “One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception.” — Charles Olson, “Projective Verse”
  5. “My writing is a picture of the mind moving.” — Philip Whalen
  6. Surprise Mind — Allen Ginsberg
  7. “The old pond, a frog jumps in, Kerplunk!” — Basho
  8. “Magic is the total delight (appreciation) of chance.” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  9. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” –– Walt Whitman
  10. “…What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature? … Negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” — John Keats
  11. “Form is never more than an extension ofcontent. — Robert Creeley to Charles Olson
  12. “Form follows function.” — Frank Lloyd Wright*
  13. Ordinary Mind includes eternal perceptions. — A. G.
  14. “Nothing is better for being Eternal
    Nor so white as the white that dies of a day.” — Louis Zukofsky
  15. Notice what you notice. — A. G.
  16. Catch yourself thinking. — A. G.
  17. Observe what’s vivid. — A. G.
  18. Vividness is self-selecting. — A. G.
  19. “Spots of Time” — William Wordsworth
  20. If we don’t show anyone we’re free to write anything. –– A. G.
  21. “My mind is open to itself.” — Gelek Rinpoche
  22. “Each on his bed spoke to himself alone, making no sound.” — Charles Reznikoff

II Path (Method, Or Recognition)

  1. “No ideas but in things.” “… No ideas but in the Facts.” — William Carlos Williams
  2. “Close to the nose.” — W. C. Williams
  3. “Sight is where the eye hits.” — Louis Zukofsky
  4. “Clamp the mind down on objects.” — W C. Williams
  5. “Direct treatment of the thing … (or object).” — Ezra Pound, 1912
  6. “Presentation, not reference.” — Ezra Pound
  7. “Give me a for instance.” — Vernacular
  8. “Show not tell.” — Vernacular
  9. “The natural object is always the adequate symbol.” — Ezra Pound
  10. “Things are symbols of themselves.” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  11. “Labor well the minute particulars, take care of the little ones.
    He who would do good for another must do it in minute particulars.
    General Good is the plea of the Scoundrel Hypocrite and Flatterer
    For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars.” — William Blake
  12. “And being old she put a skin / on everything she said.” — W. B. Yeats
  13. “Don’t think of words when you stop but to see the picture better.” — Jack Kerouac
  14. “Details are the Life of Prose.” — Jack Kerouac
  15. Intense fragments of spoken idiom best. — A. G.
  16. “Economy of Words” — Ezra Pound
  17. “Tailoring” — Gregory Corso
  18. Maximum information, minimum number of syllables. –– A. G.
  19. Syntax condensed, sound is solid. — A. G.
  20. Savor vowels, appreciate consonants. — A. G.
  21. “Compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” — Ezra Pound
  22. “… awareness … of the tone leading of the vowels.” — Ezra Pound
  23. “… an attempt to approximate classical quantitative meters . . . — Ezra Pound
  24. “Lower limit speech, upper limit song” — Louis Zukofsky
  25. “Phanopoeia, Melopoeia, Logopoeia.” — Ezra Pound
  26. “Sight. Sound & Intellect.” — Louis Zukofsky
  27. “Only emotion objectified endures.” — Louis Zukofsky

III Fruition (Result, Or Appreciation)

  1. Spiritus = Breathing = Inspiration = Unobstructed Breath
  2. “Alone with the Alone” — Plotinus
  3. Sunyata (Sanskrit) = Ku (Japanese) = Emptiness
  4. “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” — Zen Koan
  5. “What’s the face you had before you were born?” — Zen Koan
  6. Vipassana (Pali) = Clear Seeing
  7. “Stop the world” — Carlos Castafleda
  8. “The purpose of art is to stop time.” — Bob Dylan
  9. “the unspeakable visions of the individual — J. K.
  10. “I am going to try speaking some reckless words, and I want you to try to listen recklessly.” — Chuang Tzu (Tr. Burton Watson)
  11. “Candor” —Whitman
  12. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”  — W. Shakespeare
  13. “Contact” — A Magazine, Nathaniel West & W. C. Williams, Eds.
  14. “God appears & God is Light
    To those poor souls who dwell in Night.
    But does a Human Form Display
    To those who Dwell in Realms of Day.” — W. Blake
  15. “Subject is known by what she sees.” -A. G.
  16. Others can measure their visions by what we see. –– A. G.
  17. Candor ends paranoia. — A. G.
  18. “Willingness to be Fool.” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  19. “Day & Night / you’re all right.” — Gregory Corso
  20. Tyger: “Humility is Beatness.” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche & A. G.
  21. Lion: “Surprise Mind” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche &A.G.
  22. Garuda: “Crazy Wisdom Outrageousness” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  23. Dragon: “Unborn Inscrutability” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  24. “To be men not destroyers” — Ezra Pound
  25. Speech synchronizes mind & body — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  26. “The Emperor unites Heaven & Earth” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  27. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” — Shelley
  28. “Make it new” — Ezra Pound
  29. “When the music changes, the walls of the city shake” — Plato
  30. “Every third thought shall be my grave — W Shakespeare, The Tempest
  31. “That in black ink my love may still shine bright.” –– W. Shakespeare, Sonnets
  32. “Only emotion endures” — Ezra Pound
  33. “Well while I’m here I’ll
    do the work —
    and what’s the Work?
    To ease the pain of living.
    Everything else, drunken
    dumbshow.” — A. G.
  34. “… Kindness, sweetest of the small notes in the world’s ache, most modest & gentle of the elements entered man before history and became his daily connection, let no man tell you otherwise.” — Carl Rakosi
  35. “To diminish the mass of human and sentient sufferings.” — Gelek Rinpoche

Naropa Institute, July 1992        
New York, March 5, 1993        
New York, June 27, 1993 

 

These rules were originally tweeted by Emma Coates, Pixar’s Story Artist. Number 9 on the list – When you’re stuck, make a list of what wouldn’t happen next – is a great one and can apply to writers in all genres.

  1. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
  2. You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different.
  3. Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
  4. Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
  5. Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
  6. What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
  7. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
  8. Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
  9. When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
  10. Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
  11. Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
  12. Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
  13. Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
  14. Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
  15. If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
  16. What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
  17. No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
  18. You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
  19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
  20. Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
  21. You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
  22. What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

The Challenges of Group Work

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Earlier today I received this email from a fantastic high school teacher regarding the challenges of group work in her class:

Before I respond to this young lady, I wondered what your educational philosophy on this sort of issue might be. I’m tempted to let them find their own solutions to this open-ended problem of planning and filming the Brave New World propaganda project commercial but if her group members are being that unhelpful and from what I can see, they are… then it really isn’t fair to her to be stuck in the middle between my high expectations and her group members’ lack of effort. Continue reading

Writing Night Poems with First Graders

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boston night

 

Heading into another first grade class tomorrow, and we are going to write poems about night. They have been exploring everything having to do with night, so the teacher and I thought writing poems about night would be a good way for them to get down in a creative form the different things that they have been learning. Here’s how we decided to set it up:

Writing Night Poems

First Grade

Objective: For the students to articulate their vision of night in the form of a picture and in the form of a poem.

Skills: translating image in head to paper; using specific and concrete language; using five senses in writing; interpreting a peers picture into poetrynight drawings16 copy

  1. Start by looking at a drawing or two of Night. I found some cool ones online.
  2. Talk about what we see and as the students talk, write what they say on the board, creating a spontaneous poem. (Teacher will do this)
  3. Have the students draw what they think night looks like. We draw with them!
  4. Students pass their drawings to someone else in class,
  5. Read a poem about night (see below)
  6. Talk about the moves that the poem makes in the poem. Come up with some great night words. Write on board
  7. Students then write what they see in their friend’s drawing, creating another, self-written night poem that is inspired by their friend’s drawing.Teachers write too!
  8. Share

This will probably take more than one period, but I think we can get the project up and running and then the teacher can take over and lead it to its conclusion.

Materials needed:
Working smart board to project pictures
Big white board to make the collaborative poem about night
Big sheets of paper and pencils, pens, and crayons for the kid’s drawings of night
Paper to write their own poems about the pictures

ashcan night

Poem to read Thanks to Larry Fagin!

in the night I sleep like a pig.

in the night I dream the pig goes to heaven.

in the night I see stars twinkling in the window.

in the night the moon is spinning like a crystal ball.

in the night my pajamas glow in the dark.

in the night the darkness glows like the inside of a cave.

in the night the breeze blows hard on my silent pajamas.

in the night the ghost of the living dead smiles at my baby doll.

in the night all my dolls wave at the ghosts.

in the night I dream of living crickets who crawl inside my pajamas.

in the night my shy little baby sleeps his head off.

in the night owls hoot to the glaring sky.

in the night pickles whisper to 7-Up.

in the night my heart beats slowly and quietly like the only muscle I have.

in the night soft jazz plays into the windy darkness.

in the night fog clouds up the land.

in the night the river sleeps and dreams about the magic flounder.

in the night the kingfisher grounds me for nothing.

in the night the little mermaid shakes her tail and finds her prince.

in the night the clothes in the hamper are exhausted.

in the night time does not sleep.

in the night the closet silently opens.

in the night I lie awake thinking about Fred.

in the night my butler wakes me for a joke.

in the night the janitor gently sweeps the school.

in the night Mrs. Dixon heats up the milk for the baby.