One way to collect ideas

I was babysitting last night for a couple cute preschool girls when I happened to glance up at their fireplace mantle. There they were looking down on me – a couple of handmade paper turkeys.

As I was commenting on how cute they were to the girls, it occurred to me. I could use those turkeys! Not those exact turkeys, mind you, but the idea that they presented to me. Here were two different crafts I had never seen before that represented different skill levels. I could use them in different grades or as different choices in one grade. Looking at them, I could determine what needed to be done to remake them, but how would I remember all of the details without taking them home? I could write a detailed description of them – or I could take a picture. I only have a basic cell phone. It’s not a smart phone and doesn’t have many megapixels, but it does take pictures! I now have in my craft file two new crafts that I can pull out for my future elementary school class.

Writing Purposes

I feel as if I am learning two somewhat opposing ways to teach writing. One is to teach writing for a specific purpose in a specific way. The other is to teach writing for the reward of writing itself, a somewhat cathartic experience. Our class is reading two very different books about these views. One is by Regie Routman called Writing Essentials. The other, by Anne Lamott, is Bird by Bird. Now, I think one can tell by the titles themselves which one is conventional and which one is not. I admit, I tend to be a conservative and go more with the conventional text, such as teaching the actual skills of writing, but I have bitten my tongue and resolved to find some gems of worth in the other, and I think I have found some.

Lamott is admittedly a bit crude for my taste, but I do agree with her that good writing should be “about telling the truth” (p. 3). Sometimes I think she could use a bit more reserve in her descriptive powers, but I have to admit agreeing with her about her characters. Sometimes it is best to not save them but let them suffer the consequences. Her story about a “frazzled, defeated wife of an alcoholic man who kept passing out on the front lawn in the middle of one night,” was one such example. The wife kept dragging him in each morning before dawn to avoid the neighbor’s view until finally an old black woman from the South advised her saying, “Honey? Leave him lay where Jesus flang him” (p. 46). That was inspirational.

Voting Day

Tuesday is voting day. I was one of 11,000 King County residents informed that my ballot was inadvertently not mailed on October 19th. As I was reading the assigned chapter in Walter C. Parker’s, Social Studies in Elementary Education this week, entitled “Democratic Citizenship Education,” my missing ballot came to mind. I began to see the connection. Children must be taught about civic responsibility, or they won’t know what they are missing. This includes teaching students about deliberation, what it means to vote responsibly, but another factor that Parker introduced was getting students to care.

I liked the way one teacher took care of this. Tarry Lindquist started her school year off by having her students brainstorm all the ways they could make their classroom a “terrible place, a place where no one would want to come, a place where we could guarantee no learning would occur,” (p. 85). Following their description, she then asked them how they would feel having to be in that kind of classroom all year. Her students couldn’t wait to reverse their list to create the opposite of that classroom.

Parker addressed voting, stating that elementary teachers should take every opportunity to involve their students in the voting process, including deliberation (p. 95). It continues to boggle my mind when I think that women, like myself, only received the right to vote less than one hundred years ago. I remember as an 18-year-old being so excited that I was part of the first group of 18-year-olds that were eligible to vote for the U.S. presidency. It made me feel so grown-up and excited to be given the privilege to vote.

Unfortunately, today I often see more apathy than enthusiasm, regarding the right to vote, than I did back in 1972 when I first voted. Parker brings out that a crisis often is the catalyst that diffuses apathy. In 1972, it was the Vietnam War. This last week my mini-crisis was realizing that if I did not receive my ballot, I was not sure if I would be able to vote. Needless to say, my family received our ballots a few days ago, but what if the error hadn’t been found, or what if it was intentional and never corrected? We teachers have the great opportunity to encourage democracy when we continue to make civic responsibility one subject we will always include.