As I Remediate...
Picture Prompt
I’m sure that every father thinks this, but I have always felt as though my relationship with my son Grant is unique. It sounds cliché and more than a bit pretentious to say that I look at what we have as a friendship more than anything else, knowing full well that once puberty hits this notion is likely to be destroyed by the cruel hand of teenage defiance and his blind, reckless quest for independence. So, right now I’m simply going to enjoy the easy back and forth we have, the joking around that we do, the games of catch we play and try to remember how increasingly rare his asking if I want to do things with him is going to become.
This picture is my favorite of Grant and I because to me it sums up the casual but close nature of our relationship. Every year we go to Saugatuck, Michigan for a week and hang out at the beach. He’s four years old in this photo, his chubby face from infanthood still remains and he’s taking a break from running up and down the beach to eat what was his favorite snack at the time, the reliable and cheap, cheese and peanut butter cracker. I had just woken up from a nap and my wife wanted a picture, so Grant just casually leaned on me and this brief moment of time was frozen, captured for me to ponder over in later days and surely cling to desperately after he’s left.
Things change; that’s inevitable. I can already sense his pulling away from me a bit; he’s beginning to become more independent, no longer needing my help with tasks he once struggled with, finding ways to occupy his time without me, showing signs that perhaps his blindly doing the simple tasks I ask him to do might not be exactly what wants to do.
This picture is my favorite of Grant and I because to me it sums up the casual but close nature of our relationship. Every year we go to Saugatuck, Michigan for a week and hang out at the beach. He’s four years old in this photo, his chubby face from infanthood still remains and he’s taking a break from running up and down the beach to eat what was his favorite snack at the time, the reliable and cheap, cheese and peanut butter cracker. I had just woken up from a nap and my wife wanted a picture, so Grant just casually leaned on me and this brief moment of time was frozen, captured for me to ponder over in later days and surely cling to desperately after he’s left.
Things change; that’s inevitable. I can already sense his pulling away from me a bit; he’s beginning to become more independent, no longer needing my help with tasks he once struggled with, finding ways to occupy his time without me, showing signs that perhaps his blindly doing the simple tasks I ask him to do might not be exactly what wants to do.
One Person's Flashcard is Another person's..??..
I have never been adept at creating anything artistic. I have never had that artistic eye where I can see something in my mind's eye and bring it to life, at least where physical concepts are concerned. So , when we were given a vareity of seemingly unrelated objects to create I was flummoxed and went with the most obvious choice and made flashcards.
If I learned anything it was that I cannot let myself be hemmed in by convention. So many of the other things I saw that the others had done were so imaginative and inspired that I realize that I need to think outside of the box but more importantly I need to recognize these qualities in my students and encourage them to push their own boundaries. Looking at things in a different light is the key to remediation and I need to remember that this applies to so many things inside and outside the classroom.
If I learned anything it was that I cannot let myself be hemmed in by convention. So many of the other things I saw that the others had done were so imaginative and inspired that I realize that I need to think outside of the box but more importantly I need to recognize these qualities in my students and encourage them to push their own boundaries. Looking at things in a different light is the key to remediation and I need to remember that this applies to so many things inside and outside the classroom.
Romeo and Juliet???
The exercise we did in transforming a scene from "Romeo and Juliet" into another format (genre?) was a great deal of fun and opened my eyes a bit more to the notion of perspective and point of view. We took the balcony scene and went the Slasher Movie/Parody route. Our end result can be seen here: http://uiwpsi.weebly.com/blog.
I think that this would be a good exercise for the kids to do, provided we had the technology, as I think it looking at the text in a different way, it allows you to go back to the original text with a set of fresh eyes. Not that they would look at the play as a slasher film per se, but to encourage them to see how making certain choices as an author affects things dramatically. Perhaps this is also a way to have them approach the writing process in a different manner, encouraging them to take their own writing in different directions. (Exercise: Write a story but give it three different endings) I talk a great deal about POV and the unreliable narrator when teaching "The Tell-Tale Heart." Perhaps an activity like this would lend itself to expanding on the concepts introduced there.
I think that this would be a good exercise for the kids to do, provided we had the technology, as I think it looking at the text in a different way, it allows you to go back to the original text with a set of fresh eyes. Not that they would look at the play as a slasher film per se, but to encourage them to see how making certain choices as an author affects things dramatically. Perhaps this is also a way to have them approach the writing process in a different manner, encouraging them to take their own writing in different directions. (Exercise: Write a story but give it three different endings) I talk a great deal about POV and the unreliable narrator when teaching "The Tell-Tale Heart." Perhaps an activity like this would lend itself to expanding on the concepts introduced there.
Remediating at the Art Museum...
We went to the Krannart Art Museum for a tour and then a writing marathon. This was relatively easy as I saw a picture that spoke to me right away. The picture is below as is the start of a story it inspired. Not sure it's any good but it came easy...
There was very little to look forward to, living this far out, and Melanie hated it. Her father had insisted that they move to “away from town,” as he had put it and the girl knew that there was little she, her mother and her siblings could do to change his mind. What she didn’t realize was that “away from town” consisted of living some 40 miles from the nearest settlement, a situation that created no small amount of fear in her mother, something her father seemed oblivious to or simply didn’t care to acknowledge.
Having moved north from Kansas to Nebraska was hardship enough for the Founders and it was an act that seemed to be prompted by nothing more than the patriarch of the family, Judah’s need to itch the nagging sense of recklessness that would grow inside of him every three or four years until it couldn’t be ignored. These random impulses had taken the family from Illinois to Missouri to Kansas and now to Nebraska, moves that exacted no small cost on the family. Melanie was the oldest of the children and though she was only 15, she’d witnessed more than her share of death and privation at such a young age. Her twin brother Cyrus had taken ill on their first journey and had never recovered from the strain of small pox that had taken him form them at the age of 8. His withered body was buried somewhere on the trail between Centralia, Il. and Caledonia, MO, a slightly raised piece of ground where had been left a small boy, to young to dream of a future, along with a piece of her mother’s heart. Melanie had changed as well after that, in a way that couldn’t describe as much as sense. Something inside of her had gone missing after Cyrus had passed and no amount of thinking about it gave her any peace. She simply felt that she would never be whole again and that there would always be a piece of herself buried in the rolling prairie where her brother rested.
Her father seemed intent on replacing the void Cyrus had left, an endeavor his wife Charlotte did not share in with equal fervor. Melanie couldn’t help but hear the rustling, the struggles and the pleas from where her parents slept at night. She could not make out exactly what was going in from where she slept in the open loft of the crude house her father had built, but she could often hear her mother quietly weeping afterwards, soon followed by her father’s bellowing snores, becoming as oblivious in sleep to the needs of his wife, as he was when awake. It wasn’t long after Melanie became conscious of this activity that she noticed her mother growing larger, portending the arrival of her sister Emma, the youngest of the brood and if her mother had anything to do with it, the last. The young girl had arrived in the world in such a way that caused her mother great pain and to bleed profusely, to the point that had a kindly neighbor not interceded her mother surely would have bled too death. Charlotte had a lost look in her eye for some months after Emma’s coming, as though she was far away though present in body, and Melanie couldn’t help but think that it had crossed her mother’s mind that she had wished for death at the moment of crisis, instead of being burdened by another child to raise and held at the mercy of her husband’s capricious ways. It was obvious from the way he treated the young girl, or rather ignored her, that he was disappointed that his wife had not given him another sturdy boy to raise, who would eventually be of help to him. Judah became more withdrawn, though he seemed to flare up at his wife far more often and over the least bit of provocation. He was more intolerable than ever, yet if there was a bright side to this, Melanie noticed that her mother had become stronger in the face of his fury, refusing to back down or cower as she once did, once even going so far as to snapping back at her father with a vehemence that had startled them all. The loss of Cyrus and the difficult birth of Emma had fortified something within her, something that Melanie grew to take solace in as she came to see her mother as one who might protect her, lest her father become violent towards her or the others. He had never done so, but the girl had noticed sudden bruises on her mother’s face that there was no accounting for and out of spite, because of Charlotte’s insistence that they join the local church, her father had decided it was time to pick up stakes and leave Missouri for some nebulous point west.
Having moved north from Kansas to Nebraska was hardship enough for the Founders and it was an act that seemed to be prompted by nothing more than the patriarch of the family, Judah’s need to itch the nagging sense of recklessness that would grow inside of him every three or four years until it couldn’t be ignored. These random impulses had taken the family from Illinois to Missouri to Kansas and now to Nebraska, moves that exacted no small cost on the family. Melanie was the oldest of the children and though she was only 15, she’d witnessed more than her share of death and privation at such a young age. Her twin brother Cyrus had taken ill on their first journey and had never recovered from the strain of small pox that had taken him form them at the age of 8. His withered body was buried somewhere on the trail between Centralia, Il. and Caledonia, MO, a slightly raised piece of ground where had been left a small boy, to young to dream of a future, along with a piece of her mother’s heart. Melanie had changed as well after that, in a way that couldn’t describe as much as sense. Something inside of her had gone missing after Cyrus had passed and no amount of thinking about it gave her any peace. She simply felt that she would never be whole again and that there would always be a piece of herself buried in the rolling prairie where her brother rested.
Her father seemed intent on replacing the void Cyrus had left, an endeavor his wife Charlotte did not share in with equal fervor. Melanie couldn’t help but hear the rustling, the struggles and the pleas from where her parents slept at night. She could not make out exactly what was going in from where she slept in the open loft of the crude house her father had built, but she could often hear her mother quietly weeping afterwards, soon followed by her father’s bellowing snores, becoming as oblivious in sleep to the needs of his wife, as he was when awake. It wasn’t long after Melanie became conscious of this activity that she noticed her mother growing larger, portending the arrival of her sister Emma, the youngest of the brood and if her mother had anything to do with it, the last. The young girl had arrived in the world in such a way that caused her mother great pain and to bleed profusely, to the point that had a kindly neighbor not interceded her mother surely would have bled too death. Charlotte had a lost look in her eye for some months after Emma’s coming, as though she was far away though present in body, and Melanie couldn’t help but think that it had crossed her mother’s mind that she had wished for death at the moment of crisis, instead of being burdened by another child to raise and held at the mercy of her husband’s capricious ways. It was obvious from the way he treated the young girl, or rather ignored her, that he was disappointed that his wife had not given him another sturdy boy to raise, who would eventually be of help to him. Judah became more withdrawn, though he seemed to flare up at his wife far more often and over the least bit of provocation. He was more intolerable than ever, yet if there was a bright side to this, Melanie noticed that her mother had become stronger in the face of his fury, refusing to back down or cower as she once did, once even going so far as to snapping back at her father with a vehemence that had startled them all. The loss of Cyrus and the difficult birth of Emma had fortified something within her, something that Melanie grew to take solace in as she came to see her mother as one who might protect her, lest her father become violent towards her or the others. He had never done so, but the girl had noticed sudden bruises on her mother’s face that there was no accounting for and out of spite, because of Charlotte’s insistence that they join the local church, her father had decided it was time to pick up stakes and leave Missouri for some nebulous point west.