She is three sitting by me on the couch open book in her hands head bent so intent in her study of detail in the picture
She is three and I see a reader coming to light
and very possibly an illustrious illustrator of dawning intensity
even though she’s three.
My granddaugher, Micah. I’ve read A Bad Case of Stripes to her over and over. She anticipates events in the story now and comments on the drawings. She studied this page a long time.
Her first sketch of her dad.
She made her dad tie a cape on her. “I’m Batman, she told him. “Read to the Batman.”
******* with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the annual March Slice of Life Story Challenge. This is my ninth year participating alongside fellow teacher-writers.
It’s beguiling, like the sword in the stone: Dare I grasp that jewel-encrusted hilt? Even if the sword should slide free of the rock (wonder of wonders!) will I have the strength to heft its ponderous weight, to actually use it? And to what purpose?
Here is what I believe: With every challenge comes opportunity; you cannot know the outcome until you seize it (ever how cold, heavy, terrifying the opportunity may be).
And so I put my hand to the hilt here with bits of a destiny story:
When I was a child, reading and writing were practically my life’s blood. Invaluable gifts for life’s journey. When the path took terrible turns through the darkest regions, strewn with loss…I could always read and write and pray my way through. Some encouraging soul, some sage, would also appear at every critical juncture to help guide me along, before I lost my way entirely.
Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to be a pastor’s wife (nor, most certainly, did many of my young acquaintances and their parents). But here we are, my husband and I, thirty-eight years in the ministry, standing on the the cusp of our fortieth wedding anniversary, with two grown sons and two granddaughters who are the joy of our days.
I never expected to be a teacher. I quit college at twenty and didn’t go back to finish until after my youngest started school. The way was circuitous, full of obstacles…impossibilities…even loneliness and more than a little despair…until the sword called Opportunity appeared, glittering there in the gray stone of Challenge. I put my hand to it, finally graduating from college with a teaching degree when my oldest was taking his first semester college exams. Today I work with students in the very things I loved best as a child: reading and writing.
Do you believe in fate/destiny?
I see the hand of God at work in all of it…that doesn’t discount destiny, now does it?
In this, my seventeenth year of teaching (a latecomer, oh yes, but it doesn’t matter, the story begins anew every day), another opportunity presented itself: Setting up a program and a space for volunteers to come and read books to students. The challenge: Where? Every space in the building was in use, except for a recessed area at the top of the stairs, where black-draped tables once housed student “artifacts”… with a little time, imagination, and the generosity of our PTA, this has become our Heroes’ Hangout:
In this space, children fall in love with books and stories. They laugh. They learn. They experience. They ask questions. They observe. They imagine. They are at the beginning of their own hero-stories.
For, after all, are not the ideas of fate, destiny, and hero inextricably intertwined?
I have had the opportunity to guide students with writing in this space. Here’s a cento poem (cento meaning “patchwork”) composed of completely borrowed lines, my favorites from poems my second-grade heroes have written:
I worry about me and heights I cry over the iPad because Mom said no I understand my dreams tease me I see a fairy in the forest I say mermaids are real I wonder why people think Ohio is strange I dream of going to Ohio I try to be kind I worry about animals dying I hope all the endangered animals survive I wonder if Dodo birds are still alive I see a baby goat getting milk from its mother I hope people never litter again I understand that palm trees are not trees I want ice cream for life I try to be a better sister I pretend I am brave and smart I think Heroes’ Hangout is the best I pretend I am the fastest thing alive I worry I am going to lose my gravity I touch Dog Man’s hat and it feels like victory I hear my future.
Do you believe in fate/destiny?
You tell me.
I can just tell you that if you are looking for heroes…you will find children.
*******
with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the annual March Slice of Life Story Challenge. This is my ninth year participating alongside fellow teacher-writers, as a means of continually honing the craft.
Confession: For the first time in nine years, I’d decided to not take up the Challenge. Writing every day doesn’t seem sustainable right now. And maybe it isn’t.
But this morning, without any kind of plan, I got up and did it anyway. Opporunity is here. WordPress provided a prompt. I reached. I pulled.
Your hand is on the hilt, my friends. You can do this!
with thanks to Anna J. Small Roseboro, today’s Open Write host at Ethical ELA, for inviting teachers to write poems of reflection on the past school year and projections for next…my thoughts came out this way, and so I’m calling it a prose poem.
For Love of Reading
Reading and writing were the great loves of my childhood…for birthdays and Christmas, I wanted books. And more books. I never thought about them as keys to unlock life’s doors. In retrospect I see that books were my lifeline, keeping me afloat in a muddy sea of existence. I would read and find myself in another world, another life. I didn’t think about reading as amassing riches in my mind. My family didn’t have wealth but I was rich, rich, rich in books. They were my greatest treasures.
I never planned to be a reading teacher. I didn’t pursue the vocation; it pursued me. My professional role changes every year depending on funding and the current trend for helping children learn to read. For many the struggle is great. The battles waged by the Educational-Powers-That-Be are great. Year to year the sands shift, the tides of research turn, blame is passed, and verbal artillery is fired. I have served in ranks wearing armor that didn’t fit me, using approaches that didn’t dovetail with desired outcomes… furthermore, we are not talking about war. We are talking about what children need.
Every so often, the winds of war abate and through the smoke blows a bit of fresh breeze. Let us name it Opportunity. It comes offering me a chance to recruit volunteers from the community to read with students each day. It comes with a whole new library that I inventoried and archived in preparation for next fall, a wealth of beautiful books that are windows and mirrors for our young students to pick from, with their volunteer readers. It comes with taking donations of books to give to students to keep at home. It comes with redecorating a neglected space in the building, with an astounding gift of bright new seating from the PTA, to make this space special for our students. This is a sacred space. Here people will give of themselves to others, here relationships and lives will be built, here love will be born…
My reading soul rejoices.
*******
with thanks also to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge —writers need community. ❤
Here’s a story about my oldest granddaughter, then age five, told to me by her parents (also known as my son and daughter-in-law).
One night while watching the game show Jeopardy! an answer came up about a substance to be swallowed before a certain kind of X-ray.
Our then-kindergartener instantaneously responded: “What is barium?”
Which is correct.
“How do you know that?” asked the astonished parents.
“It’s in Franna’s Curious George book,” said my granddaughter.
And so it is. I’ve read it to her countless times.
George being prepped for an X-ray after swallowing a puzzle piece in Curious George Goes to the Hospital, Margret and H.A. Rey, 1966.
She never tires of this book and asks me to read it to her even now when, at age seven, she can read anything she wants on her own. My son once found one of his theology books in her bed.
I recall that that one of the greatest Jeopardy! champs of all time, James Holzhauer, said that he prepared for the show by reading children’s books in the library: “I don’t know why more people don’t do it.”
My little X-ray expert’s future looks so promising.
Lord, let me be here to see it.
*******
with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the monthlong Slice of Life Story Challenge
First they wanted to know why they have to be in this reading group.
Now they want to know why they can’t come every single day for longer amounts of time.
These kids.
They are so hung up on what is “fair.”
When I ask Why? I am told: Because things are not fair at home.
I say You know I am going to be fair here.
These kids.
They notice everything. They want to talk about nails and where I get my holographic pencils.
They want to know when I will get cooler prizes in my treasure basket (a reward for working hard. I asked them what their favorite candy is. I bought it all and also put holographic pencils in the basket…the first things to go).
These kids.
They want to know if they can have two prizes (-Did you all work hard? -Yes. – Okay, You can have two…yes, all of you).
They want to know what I will do for them when we get to the end of all their reading passages.
They inform me that they want McDonald’s to celebrate. They have already composed their order…although it changes every day.
They want to know if they can eat it in my room with me.
These kids.
They all have stories. Parts I know. Parts I don’t.
I have questions about fair myself.
These kids.
They want to know who has the highest score, who’s going to be first, who’s going to update the group star chart.
That fair thing, again.
I am not going to decide for you, I say. You figure it out amongst yourselves.
And they do. Fairly.
These kids.
They don’t know how much they’re rising above, how many odds they’re beating.
But they can see their own trajectories climbing with every reading assessment.
And they linger in my space when they’re supposed to be going back to class.
When I look up after assessing the last one’s progress, I see why…
They were writing on the board.
These kids.
Love you kids.
*******
with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the monthlong Slice of Life Story Challenge
So it was, while I was skimming about for a photo of magical waters (never mind why), I stumbled across this illustration from a book called The Wonder Clock: Or, Four & Twenty Marvellous Tales, Being One for Each Hour of the Day.
Enchanted, I dug a little deeper and learned the tale of a wood-chopper’s son who, in spite of his father’s insistence, didn’t wish to be a wood-chopper himself and went off to school instead where he studied and studied and became the cleverest student in all the world…thumbnail version: with a bit of magic and much transformative wit involving hawks and fish and ruby rings, the Clever Student leaps into the basket of a princess who’s collecting seashells by the seashore. He ends up revealing his true self, marries her with the blessing of the King, and goes home to collect his wood-chopper father to live the rest of his days in comfort by the warmth of the stove in a fine home.
Key line: “And that is what comes of book-learning.”
—Gold.
Illustration from The Wonder Clock, Howard Pyle, 1887. Public domain.
Today on Ethical ELA Jessica Shernburg invites teacher-poets to find 1-3 short texts to read and annotate or texts that we’ve previously annotated (“examples you have modeled for your students, your responses to student work, books you have marked up, etc.”). The idea is to use your own annotations in creating a found poem.
This is the kind of thing that could keep me busy for days, weeks, infinity…
My annotations come from an eclectic mix of professional development, research, an old but much-loved novel, and the Bible: Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students (Zaretta Hammond), The Power of Moments (Chip and Dan Heath), The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (Patricia A. McKillip), and John 16.
Might I violate the expectation of an experience with the right amount of tension keeping the rubber band taut
bearing in mind that there must be trust enough for productive struggle
risking vulnerability even as a disciple unprepared for the terribleness of what is to come
imagine tapping inner power to call creatures with ancient magic unto myself
Many years ago I read a series of books about a young 1940s veterinary surgeon beginning his career in Yorkshire, England. The stories are captivating, hilarious, heartwarming, and heartbreaking; the characters—some of them animals—are larger than life, unforgettable. I fell in love with these stories right away.
And so I have again, with the Masterpiece Theater version of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small. When the series premiered in 2020, it was deemed “the surprise runaway hit of the year.” The second season recently ended and I do not know how I am going to endure until Season Three. I have begun watching episodes over and over…and over…
I have to ask myself why.
Maybe it’s that I loved these stories so much when I was young. I recall encountering the name “Tristan” for the first time and being so enchanted by it (and by the comical character, another young vet) that I thought about naming one of my eventual children Tristan (a thought which earned a resounding Are you serious? NO from my eventual husband). Maybe it’s that I find details of long-ago rural veterinary practice fascinating. James delivers calves and tangled-up twin lambs; in the show he must figure out how to untwist a mare’s uterus to deliver a foal, or both will die. Or maybe it’s James’s ongoing struggle for acceptance by the local farmers who are often mistrustful, preferring their familiar “old ways” (I so relate to this as an instructional coach, sometimes).
I suspect it’s all of these. And more.
Beyond James’s love for the animals and his gentle spirit is a compelling, refreshing sense of purity. Times aren’t simple, life is hard, loss is always imminent, yet there’s a richness in it all, a sacred honesty born of living close to the land, a sense of true interdependence and valuing all living things…
Not to mention the scenery. The Yorkshire Dales are breathtaking. I have to go there someday. I feel like I have seen this place before, in some of my most beautiful dreams. Place is a character in itself, alive, vibrant, calling in its own voice, and the Dales will not be outdone by human nor beast…speaking of which: the animal performances are astounding (how DO the directors manage this magic?).
As the series progresses, so do relationships. I will not say anything more than this: Conflict, humor, and great love are all bound together by cords of civility. Reputation matters. Honor matters. Honoring life matters…
And just as one is getting cozy at the end of 1938, and snow begins to fall, and farmers lead draft horses through the town streets at the close of day, and young people are gathered together, beginning new chapters of their lives…the first war plane flies overhead in the darkening sky…
And I’ve an overwhelming desire to stop time, to hit rewind, to savor peace… which we almost never realize we have, until we don’t…
lit bits and pieces 