Wednesday

Yesterday was an excellent one at the RRVWP. Our first presentation, about using music with writing, was superb. It gave me an excellent idea - have students create a soundtrack to TKM. I like this for several reasons. First, my students are saturated with music. I bet nearly half walk around with one ear bud wedged in and their ipod in a pocket. Second, it would have been an assignment that I would have LOVED when I was a student. Third, it's still something I do. Whenever I start a new novel - especially a long one - I will program a play list on my ipod and listen to that while I read. Now I realize not every student can listen to music while they read, but that doesn't mean that they can't think of songs that would fit when in with a scene from a novel or find a song that deals with the same theme as the novel.

I also would have them write about why they chose the song, how it relates to the novel, where they would place it in the novel, and so on. Finally, I would have students either email the play list to me or burn it on a cd.

Our second presentation was on something completely new to me -synectics. It's a learning strategy that involves activities that seek to work both sides of the brain. During the presentation, we examined an image or place from a previous piece of writing. I chose my grandmother's apartment (I just wrote a little memoir about an assignment she had me do there one day. She taught me how to comprehend - at the age of five or six - all of earth's history. She taped a long piece of calculator tape from her front door to the back. Then she marked off the various stages of earth's history. So while I couldn't fathom what 300 million years meant. I could - though - comprehend spatially that 300 million years were three feet of space on the tape. My favorite part came when I finally asked Granny where humans fit in. She slashed a nearly indistinguishable mark on the very end of the tape with a pencil. That was our time on this great earth she said. Then I looked back at the other 15 feet of tape and our significance in the grand scheme of things hit me. Not a bad day of learning for a five year old).

When I shared this fragment of a memoir with my writing group, they didn't get the picture of my grandmother's apartment. So I was trying to describe it better.

So we were called to take our image or place and just list descriptions of it. I quickly filled a page.

Then we had to set that aside and choose another object from a list and describe it. Mine was a cell phone. After describing it, our next writing task was to become the object and write from its point of view. This was both challenging and interesting.

Once those tasks were complete, we had to devise an oxymoron that summarizes our second object and its relationship to the world. For cell phone I selected "an unnecessary necessity." Then we were called to return to our original object. So with "unnecessary necessity" I looked to my grandmother's apartment.

Surpassingly, this worked perfectly! It hit at the theme - I think anyway - at the heart of the lesson Granny was trying to teach me: while humans might think we're all high and mighty (a necessity), in reality (as in the grand scheme of earth's history), we are really quite insignificant (unnecessary). I was amazed at the connection