How might you use writing to tap into your personal passions? Are you writing a piece that makes you "ache with caring"? And in a chock-full, busy-every-minute life, how can educators find time for writing that is deeply meaningful, with the lens of replicating this experience for students?
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Blog: TWO WRITING TEACHERS (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: haiku, photograph, writing workshop, georgia heard, hopes and dreams, LIWP, Add a tag
Blog: TWO WRITING TEACHERS (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: community, inspiration, challenges, writing workshop, back to school, hopes and dreams, class mantras, Add a tag
What can we say to ourselves to affirm the power of writing? What words will help us move forward when the going gets tough? Thinking about class writing mantras...
Add a CommentBlog: TWO WRITING TEACHERS (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: inspiration, words of wisdom, writing workshop, bulletin boards, reading-writing connections, mentor author, hopes and dreams, classroom environment, Creating Classroom Environments Blog Series, authors as mentors, glitter board, wondrous words, blogging, Add a tag
Every summer I dream of my classroom. When considering my third grade writers, what do they need to grow and how can I provide classroom spaces for that?
Add a CommentBlog: One Question A Day (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: year two questions, last night, dreams, writing prompts, Hopes and Dreams, Add a tag
What did you dream about last night?
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Blog: One Question A Day (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: questions, writing prompts, Hopes and Dreams, dreams, Add a tag
What’s your next big thing?
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Blog: One Question A Day (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Life, Inspiration, animals, writing prompt, questions, Habits, need, Hopes and Dreams, year two questions, i can haz, Add a tag
What’s the one thing you HAVE to have?
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Blog: One Question A Day (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: dream, questions, daydream, Hopes and Dreams, right now, Add a tag
What are you dreaming about right now?
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Blog: One Question A Day (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Life, question, Inspiration, future, questions, Hopes and Dreams, five years, prediction, Add a tag
What will your life look like 5 years from today?
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Blog: One Question A Day (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Life, Events, question, Seasons, Fall, Inspiration, emotions, Home, questions, thanks, Hopes and Dreams, Add a tag
Who do you have to thank today?
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Blog: One Question A Day (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: dream, surprise, believe, questions, Fear, impossible, Hopes and Dreams, question dare, Add a tag
Can you dare to believe one “impossible” thing today?
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Blog: One Question A Day (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Music, Family, Friends, Young Adult, emotions, Answers, Fourth of July, Hopes and Dreams, The Great Outdoors, Fourth of July story, Add a tag
Some Fourth of July’s are more memorable than others. And as it’s harder and harder for us to even find a fireworks display in these lean years, I appreciate more and more the ones with truly great fireworks shows. But there’s always something more than the great fire in the sky that makes those nights memorable. Always something unexpected that happened. And it was on one such Fourth of July that I set out with my newborn daughter for the very first time after we came home from the hospital, along with my entire family.
We all piled into the car with lawn chairs and diapers and drove down our newly poured driveway, technically permitted as a sidewalk it was so steep. The technological marvel enabled me to make the trip out as we had one hundred steps to our front door and which, pre-driveway and after my first C-Section, landed me in the house for two solid months before I was physically up to the daily challenge of the descent and ascent.
So the freedom of the drive was excitement enough. But it was the venue too that made the evening even that much sweeter. We drove to my school, The Art Center College of Design, in the foothills surrounding The Rose Bowl. There was a small group of teachers and students gathered there in what used to be a sculpture park and is now the General Motors Computer Lab. We set out our chairs and I had one daughter running around the sculptures and the other in my arms. And I’ll never forget Joe, the shop guy, melting at the sight of my baby. He was a task master at school. The one who eyed the craftsmanship of the models we would create of the products we designed in the Industrial Design program, but a big softie in front of babies. I’d never seen him smile like that.
I’d left school to have another baby because that was the most important thing to me. And everyone at school was so supportive. In the twilight I caught up with my friends on how life was in their fifth term and how mine was in the early days of being a mother of two. Then the show began. One after another the rockets flared and the music played and it was pure magic sitting there, watching fireworks shoot from the Rose Bowl and explode at our level in the foothills. My mom was there too which was an extra special treat, since she’d come all the way from Chicago to help with the baby.
And with my baby in my arms and in the rockets red glare, sitting next to my former classmates and around a few of my teachers so many emotions exploded inside of me. Yes, this wasn’t the typical way a woman goes through college, but it was my way. And it felt so right.
Blog: One Question A Day (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Food, memory, fortune, Hopes and Dreams, fortune cookie, Add a tag
Do you remember a time when you cracked open a fortune cookie and read a fortune that would soon come true for you?
Blog: One Question A Day (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Friends, beach, surfing, wish, Answers, kiss, Shooting Star, Hopes and Dreams, Add a tag
Fact or Fiction? Where were you the last time you saw a shooting star and what did you wish for?
I kick my feet in the air and they land solid on my board. My right hand skims the water as I drop into the tube. Sea spray mists my face, salty and sweet. I think about all the surfers who have ever ridden this water. All the boats that ever sailed it too. I think about the ocean and the timelessness of it. That the sound of the surf, sea pounding sand, must be the oldest sound on Earth.
I love knowing the sea, something ancient, so intimately. Being right about a wave. Taking it. Touching the water as I carve, leaving a bit of me behind.
I glide into the soup. Hop off, grab my board and walk along the water’s edge. My feet sink into the wet sand. Whistles greet me on my stroll down the beach. Not knowing why, I smile and hunt for Sean in the waves. Feet slapping wet sand behind me makes my heart race and I turn around.
“Had to be the sweetest wave ever! You rode it like a pro,” Sean says, giving me a sideways hug. He takes the towel off his head.
“Let’s celebrate, Ash. Where to?” Sean unzips his wetsuit to just below his belly button and has a Tommy-Burger look in his eye. He frees his arms of neoprene, shakes his blonde hair. It freezes in the-I’ve-just-been-surfing-and-its-my-life look. He towels off his guns first, works his way to his six-pack, wraps the towel around his waist and slips out of his wet suit.
He’s hot, but best friends aren’t supposed to notice that. I absolutely love watching Sean dry off almost as much as much as watching him pull on his butt-sculpting jeans.
I look to the sea. The sunset casts an orange-purple glow to the sand and the beach sparkles in spots. “This’ll do.” The waves blown out now, everyone’s on shore.
The towel drapes over Sean’s head now. He peeks out from under it and says, “But we don’t have anything to celebrate with.”
“We have each other.” That came out wrong. Or, did it. He’s so smoking hot backlit by the setting sun.
Sean takes the towel off his head. He holds my hand. “Let’s go find a spot on the beach.”
A queasy kind of sickly feeling comes over me on our walk down the beach.
We sit in the sand for a long time without saying a word. Awkward. How is it people stay friends after they’ve done it? Never happened to me before Sean. Sand grinds between Sean’s hand and my thigh. “Come on Ash, for old times sake,” he whispers.
Sean leans toward me, pressing his body against mine. I lay down in the sand. It grinds into my hair when he kisses me, easy, slowly. I want to do it. Remember this time. Like a do-over. But I don’t want to be that girl any more. He plunges his tongue into my mouth. We kiss like old lovers. Perfect and sweet.
I wonder if I’ll ever know who I am after being who everyone else wants me to be. Do I even know how to be me?
A shooting star fades before falling into the Pacific. My alien Dear Abby says yes. I do. She believes in me. The stars save me again, from another mistake.
Blog: One Question A Day (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Wishes, Shooting Star, Hopes and Dreams, The Great Outdoors, Add a tag
Where were you the last time you saw a shooting star and what did you wish for?
Blog: One Question A Day (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Uncategorized, Hopes and Dreams, art, Life, sunset, possibilities, You, comfort zone, Add a tag
When was the last time you did something out of your comfort zone?
Blog: One Question A Day (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Friends, serendipity, Hopes and Dreams, Add a tag
When was the last time you let serendipity help you make a decision?
Blog: One Question A Day (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Hopes and Dreams, Add a tag
When was the last time you went on a treasure hunt?
Blog: TWO WRITING TEACHERS (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: reflections, responsive classroom, letter writing, hopes and dreams, Add a tag
I’ve noticed that a post I wrote last June, about letters I have my students write to me at the end of each school year, has been getting a lot of clicks lately. Since it seems like a lot of people are looking for ideas with how to end the school year with the same fanfare [...]
Add a CommentBlog: TWO WRITING TEACHERS (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: big picture, success, writers, quote, George Washington Carver, hopes and dreams, Add a tag
“Most people search high and wide for the key to success. If they only knew, the key to their dreams lies within.” –George Washington Carver Interpretation of the Quote: I don’t think I was always able to determine what made me successful (at what I do). In fact, when I was younger, I thought success equaled making [...]
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I’m daydreaming about freedom and wondering, simultaneously, if I can even define freedom.
That is a wonderful dream. It is so elusive. I found my ideas of freedom change even as I feel I’m closer to it. Right now my idea of freedom is the ability to pursue what makes me happy. In order to do this I must rely on my health and security. For me happiness includes writing and traveling. Although even as I have achieved this there are things that I’ve found might make me happier, like a home base. There was a time where I thought freedom meant making a lot of money or a college degree or living on my own. But all of these ideas changed for me over the years. There have been times in my pursuit when I’ve felt less “free” than others. Say when I was raising small children. But the joy my girls gave me far outweighed those passing feelings.
Good luck in your quest, my friend. Dreaming is a nice way to start.
Thank you! Yours is a lovely definition of freedom. Alas, I sometimes wonder if freedom is a natural state for us or if we are forever doomed to be prisoners of our own worst attributes. How free are we, after all, when our individual realities are so profoundly shaped by the narrow prisms through which we see the world?
I think that freedom as an absolute definition for everyone is hard to tackle. We can only experience the world from our perceptions. [perception=reality] But looked at individually, I believe freedom is a state of mind. I’ve seen some prisoners who were free because they were pursuing their beliefs. I’ve seen some people you might think are free–wealthy people or people who seem to have it all–trapped by their own mental prisons be it debt or guilt, etc. As far as freedom being a natural state? I do believe it is human nature to want to be free but I don’t think it’s automatically in our nature to know what that particular meaning is for ourselves. I think we have to start with an idea, pursue it and then reshape it as we live.
I find this discussion so moving right now especially as Egypt is trying to define that for herself. I know that the Americans I talk to support the Egyptian people and their quest for a voice in their government and an end to oppression.