26. January, 2021
Dear You,
Welcome to your first assignment. Some of you may remember this from other classes you’ve taken with me, but it’s another way for me to encourage us all to simply join hands and run off the dock into the water together. I started this epistolary tradition several years ago while I still taught high school English in Louisville, Kentucky. I taught at the J. Graham Brown School on the corner of 1st and Muhammad Ali. It was the only K-12 school in the district and only one of two in the State. Although public, we had a mission of super diversity and to see that representation of all communities were in our classrooms. We shared a value that differences are a bridge, rather than a barrier to human achievement.
It was at Brown that I read Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I loved how the narrator wrote the book to me, as a reader….Dear You. I felt like I was getting insight in how this kid’s mind worked and I decided I’d kick off every school year with a letter to my students, asking them to write me a letter in return. It helped me to learn who I had in my room, but also where I might want to start with instruction for the year. Why not dip our fingers in the bathwater right away and gage the temperatures?
I apologize for the water metaphors likely to come this semester. This summer, I will be leading a workshop on teaching about watersheds through the use of young adult fiction within a special partnership between the Connecticut Writing Project and Weir Farm National Historical Site. I have been very fluid in my thinking and after reading All the Broken Pieces - a story about the Vietnam War, PTSD, adoption, and parenting, I decided to keep Ann E. Burg on my radar. After she read my blog about reading her book, she mailed me a copy of Flooded, her latest release. I’m a sucker for novels written in verse, as my mind tends to think rhythmically….in the ebb and flow of waves, if you will. I knew I wanted to teach Flooded in this course because its interdisciplinary potential is out of this world. It’s perfected for exploring content-area literacy, because there’s something for every subject area teacher. I can’t wait. History. Science. Sociology. English. Math. Language. Art. It covers it all.
My water story is dull, actually. I’m an Aquarian, so I don’t really live without water. Growing up in Upstate, New York, I remember my sisters and I were always swimming. We had a little pool, and our grandparents lived by a lake, and a Great Aunt lived by a river, and my other relatives lived by the oceans and bays of Long Island. I never really thought about water, because water was a way of life: swimming, fishing, boating, skiing, and watching the stars taking their baths every morning after a night of dancing with the moon (I can thank my Grannie Annie for that).
I didn’t begin flipping like a fish out of water, until the days I felt super land-locked in Kentucky. Yes, I had the Ohio River, and I was definitely schooled by the Beargrass Creek watershed of the region - in fact, I was an intern for a task force, and eventually went on to write environmental curriculum for English/Language Arts teachers. In my bedroom, too, I still have one of the signs made for identifying Beargrass Creek that stand throughout the city. Why? Because that was one of my jobs while an intern - to design a sign. The Black-crowned Night Heron won the day. At the time, before teaching English, I would also take school groups out on rafts to show the ways pollution dumped into the larger Ohio. I moved to southern Indiana, in fact, just so I could see a large body of water every day. I began my day entering the city of Louisville and crossing the Ohio, and finished it by crossing it again back home. (I recognize I’m jumping here, but I am afraid I’ll run out of space)
As a man heading to his last year in his 40s, and as one always looking for new ways to start anew, I thought teaching The Literate Learner with a focus on watersheds, might be the perfect way to highlight what I also understand about reading, writing, and thinking communities. Every student is parallel to the raindrop. They are destined to move, trickle, and drip to larger pools of water and into an ocean of adult life. If we think as a community, that kid…that drop of water…can be offered the most pristine journey possible. This will make sense when we do an activity next week. For now…it’s just words that may or may not make sense to you.
This is, however, the first Think Piece. I write a letter to you, and you write a letter to the rest of us (which we’ll share next week in breakout rooms). We are a small cohort this year, but that’s okay, because I have confidence in the brilliance we’ll all experience together.
And I offer the following questions to get you writing, so that you may respond back to all of us next week. There’s no need to respond to any of these at all…they are written simply to get you putting words to the page.
- How was your break? How are you doing with the realities of Covid?
- What’s been on your mind lately? What have you found yourself thinking a lot about?
- What’s the last book you read for pleasure? Would you recommend it? Why?
- What are some of the goals you’ve been most focused on this year? What are some larger goals you may have for yourself down the future?
- Where are you from? Any water there? Have you ever been caught in a rainstorm that was just magical? Or did you simply get wet?
- Mountains or Oceans? (Believe it or not, there’s debate on this)?
- What grade(s) do you teach…want to teach? Is there a particular reason for this? Did you have influence from educators in your own life?
- Favorite class, workshop, lesson you ever experienced. Why?
- One thing I’ve definitely learned over the last year is….because….
- What do you want others to know about you, your world, and what you bring to this particular class?
- What questions do you have for them?
Reading these letters is my favorite activity to kick off a new season of learning together. I use responses to help me think strategically for all the learning yet to come.
And I should point out that I’m usually not so water-focused, but that’s sort of where I’m going this semester….maybe pointing out the fact, too, that water leaks from our eyes on two occasions (well, three): when we are laughing hysterically, when we are feeling great pain, and when we suffer from allergies.
What kind of rocks are never under water? Dry ones. What did one ocean say to the other ocean? Nothing. It just waved.
I am full of dad jokes. They get worse as I get older. I apologize up front.
Here’s to the Semester!
Bryan
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