The Sea of Literacy: November 2007

Sunday, November 25, 2007

The Power of Words...

THE VOICE YOU HEAR WHEN YOU READ SILENTLY

is not silent, it is a speaking-
out-loud voice in your head; it is spoken,
a voice is saying it
as you read. It's the writer's words,
of course, in a literary sense
his or her "voice" but the sound
of that voice is the sound of your voice.
Not the sound your friends know
or the sound of a tape played back
but your voice
caught in the dark cathedral
of your skull, your voice heard
by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts
and what you know by feeling,
having felt. It is your voice
saying, for example, the word "barn"
that the writer wrote
but the "barn" you say
is a barn you know or knew. The voice
in your head, speaking as you read,
never says anything neutrally- some people
hated the barn they knew,
some people love the barn they know
so you hear the word loaded
and a sensory constellation
is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,
hayloft, black heat tape wrapping
a water pipe, a slippery
spilled chirr of oats from a split sack,
the bony, filthy haunches of cows...
And "barn" is only a noun- no verb
or subject has entered into the sentence yet!
The voice you hear when you read to yourself
is the clearest voice: you speak it
speaking to you.

~~-Thomas Lux

Read this poem several times. Read it out loud. What is your reaction to this poem. What does it make you think of? Think of it in terms of your barn, your vocabulary and what this says about the comprehension of anything. What is YOUR reaction?

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Beyond Words....

There are so many layers of meanings for words, never mind when we string these words all together into sentences. It is no wonder we have communication difficulties because each word is so different for each person. What do I mean? I am talking about each person's individual schema. What do we have stored away in our minds for background knowledge and how does that dictate or mold how we come to understand a certain word or phrase. Take a word,barn, for example ...what do you do to make sense of it? Think about the word, the context, what images it stirs up for you, what it reminds you of or makes you think of. What do you see, smell, hear, touch when thinking about this word? What do you feel? Is it a pleasant feeling or not? Why? Write down your thoughts. Show us "your" barn. What does this word make you think of? How did you come to these conclusions and what strategies did you use to arrive there?

More Quotes from Wondrous Words

Page 214- “…a child who write every day can’t help but develop some sense of himself as a writer. If he is allowed to talk to others about his writing or their writing, he will develop more of his sense of self and also develop as a member of a responsive, literate community. If that student gets to read aloud something he has written, he comes to understand something of audience.”
Page 242 "One thing that I often do in ways-with-words lessons which I don't usually do in structure lessons is that I use actual texts to show how a crafting technique would look if we tried it."
Pg. 208 " 'He's messing with what I thought I knew.' Really good learning does that for us-it messes with what we think we know, creating a tension in our lives that can be uncomfortable. When we begin to feel this discomfort our only choice seems to be to quit learning and wait for the "pain" to go away, or to rethink what we know and muck around a bit in stuff that's really hard for us. I'm partial to mucking around a bit myself, and I have in fact made peace with the idea that there will always be some new hard thing for me to think about in my teaching. There will always be some part of my teaching that, when I think about it, causes me discomfort because I don't feel as sure about it."
Page 248 “Writing conferences are the backbone of the writing workshop. Good conferences move the teaching of writing from the whole-class carpet gathering to the individual writer’s desk. And what a big move it is. Conferencing is probably the hardest part of the workshop teaching. We have all spent years learning to do it better and in more and more theoretical ways, and adding this new knowledge base about the craft of writing into teaching; has only made it more challenging.”
"students are doing as writers, what they know about what they are doing, and what they need to know to do it even better" (p. 250)
p.243 "You'll want your students to have drafts and dreams of drafts floating around in their consciousness all the time, and their ability to envision craft in texts is what will make writing these drafts more and more automatic for them as they write throughout their lives."
Page 229, "Teach your students to learn to write from writers."
Pg. 235 “Formula writing has gotten a new head of steam because of testing, as many students are forced to write again and again in an artificial formula designed to help them do well on the “The Test.”
..."I thought immediately of a good writing technique I could teach him because I had that technique in my repertoire." (p. 248)

Some Favorite Quotes from Wondrous Words

Pg. 95. "Experienced writers begin moving toward writing projects not because they have great ideas, but because they have good reasons to write. With good reasons to write behind them, experienced writers know that any idea can become a good idea. It is the good reason to write that will propel the experienced writer forward through all the processes necessary to move an idea to publication."
(p.80) that, "I'm not reading to them because it's good for them; I'm reading to them because it's good for me."
page 103 and continues onto 104. She writes "When our students envision writers at work, then need to be able to see them doing lots more than just sitting at desks. Active development possibilities like those in the lists above need to be a big part of what our students can envision themselves doing as writers."
page 126 "It is important to me that students are able to envision using various crafting techniques in their own writing. If they can envision them, then they can have more power as writers because they have more choices about how they will write something."
page 106 "One of the simplest guiding questions for hypothetical inquiry is, I wonder where the author got the idea for this piece of writing?"

Integration Experimentations

The Sea of Literacy