2003 Flashback. Teaching in Denmark, Class of 2005 with Me, Writer's Notebook From that Year - Frog Sketches.

I always bring in the history of my writer's notebooks when I work with teachers to show how my thinking moved from text, to text and visuals, to visuals, to blogs (like this) which allow me to offer a little of both. I actually took 100s of photos of my notebook, because I was mesmerized by what I was doing so long ago. It is a timestamp. A moment in space. A talisman of who I used to be. 

In my sketches of that notebook are several Frog characters, including numerous comic strips and character reformations about what could possibly be a story frame for my thinking. At the time, I started a Comics club, and we looked at several graphic novels after school - a collaboration with the art teacher, and I watched my students for what might be possible directions to take. I thought I was an old fart then. I now realize I was still a pup.

Funny I grabbed this particular journal off my shelf from hundreds of journals to share with a room full of teachers today. As I looked through this particular one, I told the teachers, "It's amazing. I remember, sort of, working on the entries in this book, but I don't remember the actual story,. I have, however, the story behind the story and perhaps that is most important. I mean, 2003....These kids are now 33 years old. They were just babies when I had them, influencing my life like I was mentoring theirs.

It was, though, also the hay day of my career. I loved the National Writing Project work I was doing in my classroom. We had a phenomenal administrator with a great vision. The State of Kentucky was full-throttle behind writing instruction in all content areas and genres. It was a dream. A journal of Frog journals makes absolute sense. We were licensed to mentor a wide variety of writing possibilities in our classrooms.

Four years later, however, it all changed. The work the teachers were doing was squashed and those of us pushing kids to their best selves became targets for administration. Only the new tests mattered. Real world skills no longer did. Testing. Testing. Testing.

And that's where we've been for way over a decade. That is a generation of kids, too, who have been taught little, but tested much. More than one generation, actually.

And all of this thinking was prompted by one notebook...one perusal from one summer with 10th graders on an overseas trip to Denmark as I opened to this page in front of teachers.

The world is definitely not that place any more. 

A visual launches memory. That's the point.