On to what is important here...SNOW. It has snowed a total of one and a half inches today in my neck of the woods, and believe you me this was more than enough to shut down the entire city of Seattle. It's like Armageddon out there!
Understanding that Armageddon is going on outside my house, you can see how easy it is to grab me a cup of hot cocoa and sit down on my plaid beanbag and finish a letter to my child, which will double as an assignment for one of my classes. Why am I writing a letter to my child as an assignment for class you ask? Because Anne Lamott told me to in chapter "Letters" from her book Bird By Bird. It was as if she was talking directly to me, "When you don't know what else to do, when you're really stuck and filled with despair and self loathing and boredom, but you can't just leave your work alone for a while and wait, you might try telling part of a characters history in the form of a letter." Minus the despair and the self loathing part, I did just that!! Lamott describes the letter writing process as you entrusting (the person to whom the letter is written) with your thoughts, emotions, and memories. You begin to open up...and open up I did! This is a great way to work through writer's block.
The assignment itself is to produce a digital story. For all you Baby boomers out there, a digital story differs from a regular story in that is it totally awesome!! You record your voice onto a computer and then incorporate music and pictures to your profound words to complete the sense trifecta: Sight, sound, and ......well more sound.
The history of this assignment goes back an entire month, when I wrote what I thought was the most compelling personal story I had ever written about myself, and it was totally true!! I read it over and over to myself, then to my reading group, then to my daughter who said "that's boring dad". And the truth shall set me free! So I wrote another masterpiece that captured in precise detail the ten seconds it took me to swing a golf club, hit a ball, and come oh so close to a hole in one. My writing group informed me this lacked a rather important piece of the assignment...a literacy component. Oops. This is how I ended up here, sitting at my desk with the "Lost Season 5" DVD to my left, and the final copy of my letter to my daughter to my right. I have cleaned it up of grammatical, semantic, syntactic, punctuation, and just plain silly mistakes. I have read and reread it so that it flows off my tongue. I have searched the database of pictures to go along with my voice over and now I have to come up with the musical number that is going to tie it all together.
This is something I cannot do alone followers! I need your help choosing music to a vignette of which you know no specific detail except for that it is a letter written to my daughter. You don't know what it is about, where it takes place, or even the tone in which I write to her. But yet I ask this of you anyway. No, I CHALLENGE you to come up with a song that will bring out every emotion of the human condition (No Double Rainbow Song is not eligible). Leave me your votes in the comments section and we'll see if you are the chosen one. At this point you have a 20% chance of having your song be picked so don't delay.
I appreciate your efforts followers. Now I'm going to go relive the college dorm days and find myself a plastic lunch tray and go sled down the hill!!
Cheerio
Disney songs usually make me both happy and sad…a good start on getting all the emotions of a human. Find an instrumental version of your daughter's favorite Disney song?
ReplyDeleteNo? Well I’m sorry; I have a hard enough time picking my own song and pictures…and story for crying out loud…
Anyway, what I came to say to you today was in response to your comment for me. The impact on conferencing with our little kiddos is great and huge as you said. They should be nervous to be a part of that process with the trio-parent, teacher, and student aspect. For most students, it’s out of their element. It’s new to them. They haven’t been taught how to handle the dynamics of this kind of interaction. However, you can give them these tools. They will be forever useful and carry over into many communication strategies. I’m always looking for books to read to give the power, I mean knowledge, to find opportunities to share meaningful words in my interactions with students. For as we know, I tend to speak too quickly and harshly. One could say that is damaging to a child… :/ One book that I can’t stop raving about and learning from is Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children’s Learning written by Peter H. Johnston. Thank you Mr. Johnston for giving us this tool…now can you sit in my brain and make sure I don’t blow the opportunities to use my words as the tools they are?? It will be a constant battle, but thinking before I speak is my challenge…seams small, but for me, a big challenge ;)