Teacher Tuesday: Teachers Write 2018 with Kate Messner

Writing teachers--here's a summer writerly thing to do; I mean in between reading and naps and getting ready for next year and organizing your house and catching up with friends and reading. And naps.

Kate Messner, author and former teacher, is hosting  an online summer writing camp for teachers.  There will be daily prompts and ideas given, with the chance to win prizes (!), share your work via the comments section and have other teachers and writers respond, and to hone your writing skills so that you are a better teacher of writing.

You can find the beginning post (from July 9, 2018) here, but even if you don't sign up and participate publicly, there will be great ideas for you to try on your own or with your students. 

I'm geeked about the first prompt (a cobra capture!) and want to write a whole book around it--I'm pretty sure agents and publishers will be flooded with books (in the style of Kate's book, BREAKOUT, of course!) from other teacher-writers who feel the same way.  I will refrain and stick with the prompts for the month.  Maybe. 

After you've read Kate's blog post and the article about the cobra, consider this for classroom creative writing use (middle school/high school, though 3rd and 4th graders might love a modified version) when having them try out different points-of-view.

• As a whole class, discuss the arc the article followed--the beginning, the middle and the end of the story as reported. 
• Make sure all students are clear about the setting (Florida).
• As a class, brainstorm the characters that could be found in the story arc and assign each of your students one or more of the characters.
• Students could write journal entries, text messages, newspaper articles, news reports, a script of a reenactment of the discovery and capture, etc. within the framework of the reported arc and the setting 
• Have students place each part they write within the story arc, giving it a specific date and time so that it can be placed in the time line of the group project correctly.
• Students could work individually or collaboratively to create a fictional story based on the events.  The finished group writing project could be interdisciplinary and multimedia, with the students using art work, scientific facts, vlogs, recording the reenactment and news reports, etc.  

There are many examples in the comments on Kate's blog post that your students could use for inspiration--text messages, poems, letters, etc.  I chose to wrote a journal entry from the point-of-view of one of the student stuck inside--there were other teachers who chose similarly--we know our students well, I guess!

September 12, 2015

Miss Scholar said we had to write about the snake thing during what *would* be our recess. She’s all excited because she thinks things like this are fantastic…she says that it should give us such scope for our imagination (?????). Also she keeps singing about blue shoes and curling her lip. And saying thank you, thank you very much. She’s losing it. Probably because of indoor recess. Anyway, I chose a haiku. Cuz it’s short–haha. Here goes:

As if King Cobra
wants to be anywhere near
a noisy playground.

Dang. She said it doesn’t show enough of nature and that I should journal a bit more. As if I want to dig deeper when I could be playing basketball. Outside. In NATURE.

Indoor recess stinks.
I want fresh air and freedom.
Let us go outside.

She didn’t go for that one either. I quit.

©2018 Rebekah Hoeft

Teacher Tuesday ~ Fog

It's been delightfully foggy in the mornings near the school where I teach and the third and fourth graders are learning about fog, so what's a girl to do except make a slideshow for some of her favorite kids?

Fog ~ Carl Sandburg

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking over harbor

and city

on silent haunches                                                           © Doug Blair

and then

moves on.

You can view and use the poem in slideshow form here.

All images, excluding the cat image, were found on Pixabay and are free for commercial use.

"Fog" was written by Carl Sandburg and is in the public domain.

The cat picture belongs to Doug Blair and is used with his permission.

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Teacher Tuesday ~ Poetry Form ~ Terse Verse

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Teacher Tuesday ~ Poetry Form ~ Alexandroid

I'm a rhymer.

Yup, I said it.  I like to rhyme.

And I like a set form, whether it's a limerick or a haiku or a villanelle or a sonnet or one I impose on myself.  Writing in a fixed form can be maddening but I like the constraint it brings to my writing since I have a tendency to go on, ad nauseam, about a subject if I'm interested in it because there are ever so many words that make me happy.  Delighted, even.  Charmed.

 Ahem.

Fitting the pieces, the words, into the correct amount of syllables, using the correct rhythm, with the perfect rhyme is like a puzzle to me.

Except I don't really like puzzles--so many little pieces.  They drive me bonkers.

But words.  Words I can do.  Though I may be tempted to throw my notebook across the room when they don't quite fit.  But better a notebook than a 1000 piece puzzle, right?!

Last week I ran across a rhyming, metrical poetry form invented/discovered by Jared Carter, reported on by the Society of Classical Poets.  It's called the alexandroid.  Here's the description, as told by C.B. Anderson.

"...an alexandroid consists of six alexandrine (iambic hexameter) lines, where each line is broken into four-foot and two-foot segments, with end rhymes occurring in the corresponding segments in an abab rhyme scheme. The short segments should be indented roughly ten spaces. Two divided alexandrine lines constitute a stanza."

 "The minor segments should begin with a lower-case letter (unless grammar demands otherwise) in order to preserve the integrity of the component alexandrine lines. It can be noted that the major segment ought not to have a feminine rhyme-ending, since this would result in a metrical infelicity."

He also notes that enjambment is a good choice for this poetry form.

Well.

Let's break that down a bit, shall we?

I'm a relative newbie to the poetry writing world, so words like alexandrine, iambic hexameter, metrical felicity, and enjambment require a bit of research.  Feel free to click those links.

I'll wait.

So, as I understand it, the alexandroid:

• follows the iambic meter--da DUM (unstressed stressed syllables)
• has 6 lines that look like 12 with each line broken into 2 segments; the first segment has 8 syllables, the second has 4
• the second segment uses a lowercase letter at the beginning of the line unless it's a proper noun
• the second segment should be indented 10ish spaces
• is divided into 3 stanzas--2 lines (4 segments) per stanza
• each stanza follows the ABAB rhyme pattern
• enjambment (segment to segment and stanza to stanza) is good because it pulls the parts of the poem together.

Clear?

Here's an example--just the first stanza of an alexandroid I'm working on.  You can find the finished one here.

So far away and once upon
          a time there were
Four Droids. With varied brains and brawn
          the foe deter.

And again, with lines, stress, and rhymes marked.

Line 1.1     So FAR aWAY and ONCE uPON
Line 1.2               a TIME there WERE
Line 2.1     Four DROIDS. With VARied BRAINS and BRAWN
Line 2.2               the FOE deTER

So, let's run down the check list:

• Iambic?  Check.
• 12 syllables per line, divided into 8 and 4 syllable segments?  Check.
• 2nd segments indented with lowercase start?  Check.
• Enjambment? Check.
• ABAB rhyme pattern?  Check.

Here's how I showed the layout in my notebook before I started writing:

- / - / - / - / A
         - / - / B
- / - / - / - / A
         - / - / B

- / - / - / - / C
         - / - / D
- / - / - / - / C
         - / - / D

- / - / - / - / E
         - / - / F
- / - / - / - / E
         - / - / F

As with all poetry forms--feel free to break the rules.

I can't.  Because puzzle.

But you could.

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