Great Ideas Come at 3 A.M.

I woke up with a sudden Aha! at about 3 A.M. this morning. I have spent the last few weeks planning a new design for my AP Language and Composition class in 2015-16. We have textbooks for the first time since I have been teaching the class, so it seemed like a good idea to start over and take into account all the lessons I have learned with five years of experience. Planning has focused mainly on thematic units and independent reading lists for each of the units. While I was typing, sorting, and revising the lists yesterday, my youngest daughter was doing her AP Bio summer work. I have been mad at myself for not thinking of Stephanie Sisk's idea earlier. Instead of summer reading, she gave choices of things to do--grow a plant from seed, start a compost pile, collect sand from two different beaches, read five books not assigned for any class, touch a shark. Yesterday my daughter and a classmate tie-dyed shirts. When the Aha! moment struck, I realized the things to do are not just for summer work. I could incorporate them into the independent work and assign things to do. Our first unit is economics and the ideas for things to do just flowed out. I couldn't go to sleep until I had brainstormed ideas for all four units first semester. I am calling this READ | WRITE | WATCH | DO. Students have four units--Economy, Gender, Community, and Education first semester. They will have to select a reading activity for one, writing activity for another, film or documentary viewing for another, and a doing activity for another. The reading activities are non-fiction, novels, or short works--essays, poems, visual texts, short stories. They choose one long work or four short works to read on the theme, then complete a reflective letter on the work(s). The writing activities are more creative or long-term than we typically work on in a unit; many require original research such as interviews, surveys, data analysis, or observation. The watching activities are classic and contemporary films or documentaries on the subjects. Many are controversial; some are R-rated. All movies above a PG rating require parental approval and permission. Finally, the doing activities. A few of these are suggested by essays in the text. For instance, the excerpt from Walden prompted me to tell students to go to the woods; an essay by Wendell Berry about waste prompted me to ask them to collect their family's trash for a week and document it. Students have the freedom to choose their media and to present information effectively but creatively. By the end of the semester students will have read at least one additional book, watched a film, written a creative response, and done something they might normally not have done. All of these things are what I refer to as "stacking ammo," a term I stole from Eminem when he was explaining his thought process to Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes In the process of writing all about doing things, I realized I needed to be doing something I have neglected--blogging. So as my students work on their READ | WRITE | WATCH | DO, so will I. The blog will be my product. I will be demonstrating how I stack ammo. On the AP test, students need ideas beyond the classroom to successfully argue. The need ideas that don't belong to Nathaniel Hawthorne. They need individual voice. Planning, selecting, and choosing the path through the thematic units and activities will ensure they have unique ideas. And great ideas sometimes come at 3 A.M.

Women with Guitars

I wanted a guitar and lessons so desperately when I was a child that I saved up the Green Stamps from Winn-Dixie to get one. But bratty little girl named Kristen visiting our house with her parents grabbed the shiny new yellow guitar hidden between my chiffarobe and the wall. She yanked hard on the strings to dislodge it from the place I had hidden it from her. The cheap wood on the Green Stamp guitar couldn't fight off a determined four-year-old, and my dreams of becoming a singer- songwriter were ripped away. Even without Kristen, the dreams wouldn't have come true since I am virtually tone deaf. But in my story it was the loss of that precious guitar, not my own lack of talent that kept me from my childhood dream.

Perhaps it is this unfulfilled dream of being a woman with a guitar that has made me like the music of women who play guitars. Perhaps it is because in them I hear the stories I tell. Perhaps it is because I am a woman.

This week I have taken my daughters to hear five different women with guitars, each telling stories that have made me laugh, weep, and feel empowered.

I entered the Taylor Swift concert Thursday at Gwinnett Arena thinking it would be a night of pop music shared with my daughters who love her songs about lost teen love. Taylor told a story about being a gawky, tall middle schooler without friends who wrote in a journal about dreams of one day using her talents to write songs she could sing to girls like her who blended in to the crowd. She said that she could have been another face in the crowd (cue spotlight--Taylor Swift standing in the crowd just next to my daughters), but instead she was living her dream singing before girls screaming out her name. I left the concert feeling Fearless with a black t-shirt with two guitars and that word emblazoned on the back.

Last night Emma and I went to Agnes Scott's Presser Hall to see Caroline Herring, Kate Campbell, Claire Holley, and Mary Chapin Carpenter performing a musical tribute to the great Southern storyteller Eudora Welty. The event was first organized for the 100th anniversary of Welty's birth in Jackson, Mississippi. The artists came together Saturday to reunite for a performance at the Decatur Book Festival. Four women with guitars sitting on a stage telling stories and connecting them to the life they were honoring. Fearless.

Caroline told a story about taking her French exchange student to Welty's house one Easter break. Claire told about leaving the South behind and returning home. Kate told a powerful story about hearing in Welty's characters her own voice, the way I felt when I first read To Kill a Mockingbird by another southern storyteller Harper Lee so many years ago. Campbell then told about actually seeing an interview with Eudora on PBS. The writer talked about how torn she felt as a Southern woman embracing the culture but embarrassed by our history. Then Campbell sang her song "Look Away":
I saw sweet magnolia blossoms
I chased lightening bugs at night
Never dreaming others
Saw our way of life
In black and white
In five lines from that song, I heard my childhood. Chapin Carpenter, an artist my children grew up listening to and seeing on stage, said that finding the voice of your characters was important to Welty and to her. She sang "John Doe 24," the lyrics she wrote about a deaf-mute-blind man who died unidentified after many years in the Illinois mental health system. Chapin carried his obituary around in her pocket for weeks until the song came. She gave a story to a man who couldn't tell his. I cried, realizing that was the message I was telling my students the day before as we read Gilgamesh , and I tried to connect it to the message Taylor Swift was singing about. The story is what matters.

Eudora Welty wrote: All serious daring starts from within. These women have dared to tell stories to their daughters. I hope that Julianna and Emma will feel the same way about women with guitars one day.

Sounds of Silence

Yesterday afternoon I experienced the first day of quiet in my house in 17 1/2 years. Emma packed enough household goods for a 1300 square foot cottage and moved into a 12 x 12 dorm room for two at Agnes Scott College a week ago. Julianna went to a not-so-slumber party with Bailey the evening before; therefore, she came home and drifted off to golden slumbers on the living room couch. Yesterday, Will gathered the last of his necessities--toothbrush, Lectric Shave, and a jar of peanut butter-- and headed to the University of Pennsylvania with his father in a Honda Odyssey packed with books, t-shirts, and angry defiant music.
By noon, the house was silent. No tv blared, no banjo strummed, no cell phones hummed. I didn't trip over stray shoes. I didn't hear doors slam when I suggested it was time to take out the garbage. I didn't even hear the Disney channel remind me that the Suite Life, Wizards of Waverly Place, or Hannah Montana would return in a moment.
It was the perfect day to clean house, to grade papers, to read the many books I have put off, to catch up on sleep. It was the perfect day to take a bubble bath without being interrupted, to write the first chapter that has been stuck inside my head, to watch the DVDs that have remained unopened. It was the perfect day I have been dreaming of for 17 1/2 years--a day to myself in my house with no where to drive, no obligations except my own.
It was the perfect day to sit alone, to cry, and to wonder where the noise had gone.