How can we make sense of yet another horrific act of senseless violence? Yesterday’s events in France have me in a state of despair. The light-hearted poem I had planned to share today now seems inappropriate. What to share instead?
As I walked my dog this morning, I was hyperaware of my surroundings, noticing traces of spider webs, ripening blackberries, and the cacophony of bird songs. Noticing the beauty of the world right in front of me. Somehow all this noticing reminded of me of this poem, which I wrote several years ago.
My mind and heart are overflowing with all the passion, knowledge, and energy that was shared by the colleagues I was fortunate enough to learn with and from at the International Literacy Association Conference in Boston. I’ll be reading, digesting and thinking about the sessions for weeks to come. But while the experience is still fresh in my mind, I want to share some key take aways.
“We all have a life worth writing about.” Adora Svitak
“Give your students a little piece of sky; help them soar.” Kwame Alexander
“Books provide imaginative rehearsals for the real world.” Kelly Gallagher
“Let kids know that “what they have to say matters.” Linda Rief
“We want kids to be responsive to the characters & themselves” Bob Probst
My weekend in Boston was also filled with seeing old friends and meeting online friends in real life.
With Colette Bennett, Jan Burkins, and Kim Yaris.Slicer Breakfast at the Trident Cafe.So happy to meet Molly Hogan in real life!With Colette Bennett before our presentation.
If you’ve never attended a national conference, it’s an experience you’ll never forget. Thank you, ILA, for a wonderful weekend!
Summer. Thoughts turn to mornings of clearing away the clutter of a busy school year and lazy afternoons with a book, days at the beach, adventures near and far. But most of all, TIME to write! It’s been a slow transition for me this year, though, as I’ve been writing curriculum and taking care of other work obligations that seem to have no end. I’ve been de-cluttering like mad, but my writing has come in fits and starts and feels stale and stilted. The best remedy for this? Read poetry, of course!
So I revisited one of my favorite anthologies from the past few years, Firefly July (Candlewick Press, 2014). This entire collection, selected by Paul B. Janeczko and brilliantly illustrated by Melissa Sweet, radiates joy. On every page, poets surprise and delight with perfect images and metaphors. “A Happy Meeting”, by Joyce Sidman, is just one example.
Joyce’s poetry always gives me a jump start, and I remembered she has a new book coming out, so I went searching for more about that. As you may know, Before Morning, with illustrations by Beth Krommes, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the fall. And although I didn’t find too much about that book, I did find this interview, from 2010, with Julie Danielson at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast.
At the very bottom of the page, this treasure is waiting:
“How to Find a Poem”
by Joyce Sidman
Wake with a dream-filled head. Stumble out into the morning, barely aware of how the sun is laying down strips of silver after three days’ rain, of how the puddles are singing with green.
These words are as true today as they were 2500 years ago. I may have heard or read them before, but I was happy to see them painted on the wall of the “Cabinet of Art and Curiosity” installation at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford yesterday. I was there to participate in the museum’s “Summer STEAM” workshop, designed to show teachers “the many ways art can enhance science, technology, engineering, and math” in their classrooms.
Lisa Delissio, a STEM Faculty Fellow at Salem State University, began the day with a talk about the intersection of art and science. She explained that the “perspective and knowledge of artists is essential to scientific approaches to problems.” Specifically, she listed the observational skills artists bring to their work that have been found to have an impact on the skills of her biology students. These include:
She asked us to use the observational skills of an artist and the perspective of a biologist to respond to the image with word and/or pictures. My sketch was very rudimentary, but my jottings were very much dominated by my poetry brain. I was immediately drawn to the stamens of the large flower in the foreground, which reminded me of sunspots exploding on the sun and the flower in the bottom center waiting to bloom. To me, its folded petals looked like hands folded in prayer.
We were given ten minutes to work on this, which sounds like a long time. But it really wasn’t. I could have easily spent another half hour working on my observations and the poem I was beginning to formulate. Keeping the STEAM theme of the day in mind, I started a Fib poem, a poem which uses the Fibonacci sequence to determine the number of syllables in each line.
Fat skink rests on bright purple aster petals, their stamens exploding like the sun.
The auditorium full of dozens of teachers was absolutely still as people worked. But it didn’t feel like work at all. We were completely engaged in our creativity, our intellectual curiosity sparked by the blending of diverse disciplines. As Dr. Delissio explained, students who pursue double majors in science and the arts are more creative, and exhibit more intellectual curiosity and divergent thinking than students with a single major.
Attending this workshop was a joy for me, not because I needed convincing that the arts should be included in STEM, but because it bolstered my belief in the importance of including the arts in our classrooms. As schools across the country embrace STEM and devote time and resources to integrate STEM into the curriculum, we have to ensure that the arts are always included. As Anne Jolly points out in a recent Education Week article, “The purpose of STEAM should not be so much to teach art but to apply art in real situations. Applied knowledge leads to deeper learning.”
Sometimes when we read a poem there’s an instant connection between us and the poet. Someone we’ve never met, maybe even never heard of, has managed a magical transformation of words into phrases into stanzas that reach into our heart, like the first rays of sunlight bathing the tips of tree branches in its yellow glow. In that moment we know we’ve found a treasure worth keeping.
In her poem “Wish”, Linda Sue Park captures this process perfectly:
Wish by Linda Sue Park
For someone to read a poem again, and again, and then,
having lifted it from page to brain– the easy part—
cradle it on the longer trek from brain all the way to heart.
From TapDancing on the Roof; Sijo Poems (Clarion, 2007)
Not every poem we read, and certainly not every poem we write, makes that journey. And yet, we soldier on. We keep reading, we keep writing, because, as Katherine Bomer reminds us, “the journey is everything.”
When I first read this poem by Robert Haas, I knew I’d found a treasure that made that journey.
“Stanzas for a Sierra Morning” by Robert Haas
Looking for wildflowers, the white yarrow
With its deep roots for this dry place
And fireweed which likes disturbed ground.
There were lots of them, bright white yarrow
And the fireweed was the brilliant magenta
Some women put on their lips for summer evenings.
The water of the creek ran clear over creekstones
And a pair of dove-white plovers fished the rills
A sandbar made in one of the turnings of the creek.
I took this picture at the end of April at a pond near my house. Since then, I’ve been working on this poem, trying to find just the right form, words, and phrases. During that time, I’ve felt like I’ve been buried in the mud and muck of school busyness, which has drained my writing energy. Now that school is over, I decided to revisit these happy turtles, and emerge into the sunshine with them.
Please be sure to visit Carol at Carol’s Corner for the Poetry Friday Roundup!
“Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for human survival.” ~ Dalai Lama XIV ~
I noticed this sign on the edge of the road as I was driving to work. And it did make me slow down. I noticed its counterpart on the other side of the road on my way home that afternoon. Even though there was no sign of the fawn or its mother, I was thankful for this reminder.
I thought of this sign over the weekend when I was at dinner with my family. It was a beautiful summer evening, and we were eating on the sidewalk terrace of a busy restaurant. Suddenly, a woman was sprawled on the sidewalk.
Her toddler had wriggled away from her (they are slippery little things!) and she tripped while running after him. Her hands were scraped and she split her lip, which was bleeding profusely. I ran into the restaurant to get napkins, and someone else got her a glass of water. She was more startled than injured, and after a few minutes those of us who had helped her returned to our dinners.
Helping this woman wasn’t something I thought about. I just did it. Over the past year, my family, like far too many families, has been coping with a sudden loss. We have been overwhelmed by the many kindnesses, large and small, often from total strangers, shared with us during this time. How could I not extend my hand to this woman?
Since Sunday’s horrific news from Orlando, I’ve felt dismay and revulsion at some of the rhetoric being bandied about so carelessly. But I’ve also been heartened by the countless selfless acts of kindness, from women passing out carnations to the families of the victims to the hundreds of people lined up to give blood. This outpouring of sympathy and solidarity from all corners of the world gives me hope. Hope that we can rise above fear and hate. Hope that we can all find the compassion within ourselves to slow down, extend a hand, and treat others with care. Hope that love will prevail.
Some weeks I have my Poetry Friday poems picked out early in the week, especially if I’m sharing an original poem. Other weeks, when work and life in general threaten to get the best of me, as this one has, I’m scrambling to find a poem that speaks to me. But when I saw this on a friend’s Facebook page today, I knew instantly this was the right poem for this week.
“The Arrow and the Song”
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.
I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?
Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.
Be sure to visit Jone MacCulloch at Check It Out for the Poetry Friday Roundup!
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Albert Einstein
After hours of collecting and analyzing data, looking for reading behaviors used or not, identifying vowel patterns known and unknown, after hours of planning lessons, carefully choosing books and poems to support student needs AND spark their interest, after hours of instruction, coaching and supporting strategies or sounds they’re using but confusing, after phone calls and parent meetings about how students are or aren’t progressing, we’ve arrived at the last week of school, and the last lessons with my students for this year.
And the question on everyone’s mind? Did they meet the goal? Not did they meet their personal goal, but did they meet the goal for first grade? In the case of the students I work with, intervention students who came into first grade below the grade level goal, the answer is no.
And yet, they have made tremendous personal progress. They are all confident readers. They read books at their independent level fluently and with expression. They understand what they’ve read and have ideas about why characters act the way they do. They read nonfiction with curiosity and enthusiasm.
Do I feel like I have failed these students? Yes and no. I know their classroom teacher and I did everything we could to support their progress. I know they worked hard when they were with me and made incremental gains on most days. But teachers are always second-guessing themselves. We feel like there must be something else we could have done. But very often, our best truly is enough. These five- and six-year olds just need more time to learn those diphthongs and -r controlled vowels. They need more time to remember to try a different vowel sound if they one they used doesn’t make sense.
I’m willing to give them that time, as long as they’re making progress along the way AND they are falling in love with reading. If both of those things aren’t happening, then something needs to change. If the teaching techniques I’ve been using aren’t meeting their needs, then it’s my responsibility to find a new strategy or technique that does meet their needs. Have I done this? Yes. So back to the original question: Did these students meet the goal?
In my mind, yes. They are readers who can problem-solve to read unknown words, they make meaning from the texts they read, and most importantly, they enjoy reading and are proud of their accomplishments. And isn’t that our goal for all our students?
This post is part of “DigiLit Sunday,” hosted by Margaret Simon at Reflections on the Teche. This week’s topic is PERSPECTIVE.
“Sympathy as a desirable quality is something more than mere feeling;
it is the cultivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them.” ~ Thomas Dewey ~
It’s often said that history is written by the victors. This implies, of course, that only one side of a story gets told. What happens to the stories of the vanquished? Isn’t their perspective of events just as valuable? What truths are hidden within the stories that don’t get told?
In Salt to the Sea (Philomel Books, 2016), Ruta Sepetys tells the “hidden history” of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloffby a Soviet submarine in January of 1945. An estimated 9,000 people lost their lives in the icy waters of the Baltic Sea as a result. By giving voice to four teens fleeing East Prussia at the end of World War II, Sepetys masterfully weaves the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff together with their stories.
Three of the four narrators, Joana, Florian, and Emelia, tells the story their journey toward safety from their perspective. The fourth narrator, Alfred, is a German sailor aboard theWilhelm Gustloff. Each chapter reveals a bit of the character’s history. But the bigger picture also begins to come into focus. The brutality of the Soviet Army as it advanced toward Germany. The selfishness of the Nazi leadership and their pernicious xenophobia. The sacrifices ordinary people from every country made for those they loved.
The tapestry that emerges gives readers a much deeper understanding of the events than any one of the narrators would have created individually. It also builds our sympathy for each of the narrators and their traveling companions.As we get to know them, we realize that each of them carries a secret that haunts them. Just like every other human on the planet.
On this Memorial Day weekend, let’s resolve to find and share these untold stories with our students. It seems to me that the political hyperbole in the U.S. today makes it even more urgent that stories like Salt to the Sea be shared. These are stories that will broaden our perspective, and help us develop the imagination needed to see something of ourselves in the stories of others.
Listen to Ruta Sepetys discuss Salt to the Sea on NPR’s Morning Edition here.
![By Prosthetic Head (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://readingtothecore.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/cape_skink_flowers.jpg?w=360&h=299)
Reading to the Core 
