Snoopy Is My Co-Pilot

I grew up with Snoopy and the Peanuts gang. I read the comics, had a stuffed Snoopy, and even a cutlery set for meals.

When I taught preschool, Snoopy was my co-pilot. At the beginning of the year, I would introduce stuffed Snoopy and tell the kids that he was going to help teach class. “Snoopy says…” (i.e. “please help pick up the toys,”) became a regular part of our school day.

Lately Snoopy’s been sitting on the shelf, because the older kids don’t really need him. Or do they? Last week, I wrote a letter to my middle school student and sent it in the mail, as an example of a fun way to practice handwriting. While cleaning out my desk I found some Snoopy stickers I used with the little guys. “Do you like Snoopy?” I asked, as an afterthought, at the end of the letter.

Who knew what was coming? Not only does he like Snoopy, but he has a Snoopy watch. At our next session, which turned out to be the best one ever, I downloaded an image of Snoopy at a typewriter, and added a thought bubble: “Snoopy says, “We need snacks!” This is the student’s grocery list template, which is a great way to practice cursive writing.

Oh, and something else. His essay on the beach is almost done. Not only has he written all the parts for his graphic organizer, but he even volunteered to finish writing it on the weekend! Talk about being in the zone. This is what I meant several weeks ago when I wrote about being “lost” in play or reading.

In the end, everyone needs Snoopy.

Icebreakers

Last week I started working with a middle school student on summer reading and writing assignments.

I love meeting new students and getting to know them. One of the first things we did was an icebreaker called Three Things About Me. The student began by writing something important about them on a sheet of paper (i.e. I love cooking). Then it was my turn. We went back and forth until we each had three important facts about ourselves written down so we could get to know each other. Another game we played was Best/Worst Day Ever. Finally, My Favorite Things was a big hit, devoted to three prized possessions that give pleasure.

Icebreakers are creative, revelatory, and most importantly, show students that summer learning — indeed all learning -- can be fun and doesn’t have to feel like “school.” 

Unless, of course, they like school, and that’s okay, too.

Ages and Stages

One of the challenges of tutoring students of all ages is just that. Different ages, different stages.

In one season you may be working with a fourth grader and a high school senior all at the same time. Which means creating curriculum for differing needs.

This summer my rising 7th grader is finishing a Harry Potter-inspired play and my rising 6th grader is learning how to develop his ideas, as well as practice cursive handwriting. Oh, we’re also reading The Diary of Anne Frank.

Being organized is key. Also, remembering that it’s summer and it should not feel like school. During the icebreaker stage we discovered a point in common. We both love the beach. Which is why he will write an essay about the joy of being there. 

During the brainstorming process we wrote down five details about the beach: the ocean, snorkeling, lemonade, the sun, and sand. Then we added three reasons why each detail is pleasurable (i.e. lemonade is refreshing on a hot day). Next we will fill in a graphic organizer with this information. I’m really looking forward to reading the final product.

Sure, it’s challenging to keep all these plates in the air. But I forgot to mention the most important thing: I love every minute of it.

Pete From Park Slope

I met Pete Hamill at a book reading some years ago. He was lovely, affable, and we talked about Park Slope, where he grew up.

There were a lot of characters back then, he told me.

“There still are,” I said.

Hamill was fascinated that gentrification hadn’t killed the gentleman who repeatedly asked for a cigarette on Union Street, the “man in white,” – yes, he never wore anything but a white sweat suit -- or the woman in the black skirt. The one she wore every time I saw her, winter or summer, rain or shine.

On Memorial Day weekend the weather was lousy. Folks were wearing coats and scarves. There was less iced tea and more soup. But there was time to finish the exquisite A Drinking Life, Hamill’s memoir of growing up in what we now refer to as the South Slope, during the Depression and World War II.

In Hamill’s extraordinary storytelling hands memory and detail create a long-gone Brooklyn where kids owned the streets and drinking made you a man. It also got in the way of his relationship with his father and eventually nearly broke his ability to write.

I’ve always loved the great journalists of the 20th century, those hard-boiled men and women who lived for the printed word. Hamill is at the top of this list, a master of his craft, a New York storyteller of the first order. 

Weekend Plans

“I am happiest when I am reading a good book and drinking iced tea.” 

So said the math teacher in his All About Me share at the end of the year. There’s a theme running here…the joy of quiet time…reading and drinking tea or lemonade.

The weather’s supposed to be lousy this weekend…there goes the beach. What could be better, though, than curling up with my latest, A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill, with a tea or lemonade?

Lost In Reading

“What is your favorite weekend activity?” the Second Grade teacher asked her students this week.

“Drinking lemonade and reading a book,” one students answered. Wow…sign me up.

“The more you read the better a writer you become.” I’m sure you’ve heard this one. I remind my students of this all the time. Watching the Second Graders do their independent reading for 20 minutes, where there are no sounds and everyone in simply focused on one activity – reading – is simply joyous.

In our noise-crazed world it seems out of time, as well.

Lost In Time

One of the joys of working with young children is watching them get lost in play.

What a luxury. They simply have nothing else to do. They don’t have to pay bills, mow the lawn, or contemplate careers. They are at one with play.

It’s getting harder and harder to get lost in time in our ultra-connected world. When was the last time I had that chance? So long ago I cannot remember. What I do know is when it happens. The house is quiet, the phone isn’t ringing, and I have the time to get lost in whatever I am doing for more than five minutes.

Sheer joy.

Back to Juggling

Last month I started teaching again as a preschool sub. 

That changed everything. I was thrilled to get out of the house, be with the little ones, and have a new rhythm to the day. At the same time, though, time was going to be a challenge. I’m a morning person -- everything that has to get done happens early in the day. 

Writing has always happened first thing. It’s when I have the energy to be creative and think clearly. When you’re working out of the house though, morning rhythms are completely different. There’s no more rolling out of bed in sweats and a tee with a leisurely cup of coffee. Now there’s showering, getting dressed, and the all-important preparation of snacks. In other words, there’s a schedule. Where does writing fit in?

For many years, I adhered to the I-can-only-write-in-the-morning maxim, until I realized that in the end you make your plans and the universe laughs. Nobody, least of all a deadline-wielding editor, cares whether you are a morning, mid-afternoon, or late- at-night person. They care about the job getting done. 

Then I realized I had to face facts. I could no longer be precious about when I write. I simply had to get the job done. Sometimes that means coming home from a day in the classroom where I am completely whipped, lying down for 45 minutes, then getting back to writing. The important thing is not to beat myself up on these days if I don’t get a massive amount done. Some writing always trumps no writing.

It’s great to be back in the world again. Now, I just have to do a bit of juggling on the writing front.

Magnolias and Irises

In the Writer’s Circle at the New York Public Library, we have written letters, fiction, and non-fiction. This week we tackled art, for the second time. Initially, we had done so looking at still life objects when we were in the physical space. This time, we looked at an online image of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s stained-glass Magnolias and Irises (1908).

Writing about art can be as simple or complex as the writer chooses. The beauty of this exercise was how diverse the responses were. Participants wrote about feelings, abstractions, and ideals, and each one could not have been more different from the other.

One of the more fascinating discoveries of the session was that the postcard I was working from was more muted than the vibrant image the Metropolitan Museum of Art posts on its website, which was the one the participants used. This in itself prompted a discussion of the different perspectives we had of the work.

The exercise was a wonderful reminder that art is truly in the eyes of the beholde

Stuck in the Middle

The Week In Writing

Here’s another problem: going down the rabbit hole.

We’ve all been there: the storyteller who isn’t an effective storyteller. They start telling you what they are going to tell you, and you’re with them…so far. You know what is coming. Except you never get there.

Instead, you get every detail -- so much detail and way too much information -- that you do not need for the story. Often, this is where the listener has no choice but to finally jump in and ask, “So what happened? Did you (fill in the blank)?”

In his book Developmental Variation and Learning Disorders, Dr. Mel Levine identifies “poor narrative sequencing” as a possible manifestation of a Sequential Ordering Problem, or what I like to call being stuck in the middle. The student has the beginning, ones hopes that there will be an end, but, for the moment, they cannot get there because they are in a muddle in the middle.

Another reason this may come up is what Levine refers to as “sense of the audience” (or lack thereof) which can be a sign of a Higher Order Cognition problem. For such storyteller, it is almost as if there is no audience, and they are simply in their head but speaking each thought and detail aloud.

How to support such students?

First, signal how interested you are in their story. Let them know how hard you think they worked on it and how much you want to find out what is going to happen.

Second, use positive language to reinforce said interest, i.e. “I love the dialogue you used for your characters and the way they are interacting with each other.”

Finally, remind them that they want to keep their reader engaged, and that in order to do so, their story should have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Asking them to identify what information is crucial to the story and what is not can help writers stay on track with the stages of their project, whether it be fiction, non-fiction, or academic assignments.

What’s the Story?

Here’s a problem I come up against a lot: great atmosphere, little story.

It’s when the writing student has a great sense of character, dialogue, and setting but there’s not much happening in terms of a story. The reader reads but they are going nowhere.

How to help?

Even the smallest children understand that good stories always have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The trick is always to hook the reader from the start. Kathy Caprino, a Senior Contributor at Forbes, says,

“We don’t start a story with: “I am going to tell you a story about the summer that I found out I wasn’t as timid as I thought.” What we publish instead is: “As I hung over the cliff, clinging to the exposed root of a windswept tree, I realized that I was braver than I thought...”

Another important point is…what’s the point? Why is the student telling this story in the first place? What is it that they want to get across? 

Which brings me to the final issue: what’s the problem? Often, the crux of the issue is that students are displaying great skills at the big three — character, dialogue, and setting — but have not identified why they are using these skills. When they can show the ultimate problem that the protagonist is about to solve – what every Bildungsroman, or hero’s journey is about – they have a real story.

For more on storytelling and how to engage readers:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2014/04/10/7-essential-tips-for-writers-who-hope-to-engage-millions-of-readers/?sh=5e2053451cad

Remembering Research

Some things stick.

For me it was Mr. Shapiro’s eight grade English class. We read some great books that year: Welcome to the Monkey House, A Separate Peace, and the iconic Catcher in the Rye.

We also learned how to research. On old-school index cards. Idea on the front. Citation on the back. Last name, first name. Title. City, publisher, year. Page. Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York, Bantam, 1969. This would be the ubiquitous, maroon-colored paperback that everyone everywhere read at the time, although the novel was first published in 1951.

Research meant going to the library, and Mr. Shapiro taught us that the largest collection was at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library.

Ah, Mid-Manhattan. What a dump. Although the outside of the former Arnold Constable and Company department store was lovely, the inside, designed in the brutalist style and opened in 1981, was brown and bleak. I look forward to seeing the stunning renovation, which was, sadly, to open in the spring of 2020.

Something about that research lesson never went away. To this day, I prefer index card citation to keep track of my research. One reason is that I find it harder to lose information when I have it in my hands. On my laptop there is that gaping black hole.

On a recent research project, I hauled out those index cards and file box and got to work. It was deeply satisfying.

Thanks, Mr. Shapiro.

The Art of Editing

Editing is really hard. Teaching editing is even harder.

I’ve had this conversation many times with students and parents. I don’t even know how I edit. I simply do it. And therein, perhaps, lies the problem. How do you teach something you simply do?

There are three cardinal rules I follow when editing. The first is that the little picture has to match the big picture. In other words, what the writer is trying to say in each sentence has to be consistent with the overall message. When presented with a new project — whether it be paper, play, or essay — I always look for what the writer wants to tell their audience. Then we work on each paragraph and sentence together to make sure they match that message.

Second: “Omit unnecessary words.” Strunk & White said it decades ago and it still holds true today. It is also one of the hardest aspects of editing to teach because writers can become very sensitive about having their words cut after having worked so hard on them in the first place. I always ask the writer whether there is a better way to say it, or if they see how they are repeating themselves simply using different words. By placing the responsibility for editing the work in the writer’s hands, it feels less offensive than the old red-pen-through-the-writing of yesteryear.

Write for the reader (part of “Omit unnecessary words”). One issue I’ve dealt with, which can be particularly challenging, is when writers are not writing for an audience but rather for themselves. A scene, for example, is described in massive detail that is not only unnecessary, but will turn the reader off, or worse, lose them by this point. One helpful tip here is to have the writer read the scene aloud and remind them that they are telling a story. Effective storytellers always use the least amount of words possible so that they keep their audience engaged.

Third, order equals method. One of the common mistakes new writers make is placing their paragraphs in the wrong order — “burying your lede” in the world of journalism. I’ve read many manuscripts where the story started in the wrong place and the paragraphs had to be — like a jigsaw puzzle — reconfigured in order for the reader to have a clear sense of how the story is going to unfold.

One of my favorite books on the subject is William Zinsser’s On Writing. “Clutter,” Zinnser says, “is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.”

And one of my favorite moments in the book is when he refers to a World War II government black-out order:

"Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal buildings and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination."

“I would have preferred,” Zinsser states, “the presidential approach taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he tried to convert into English his own government's memo[s]:”

"Tell them," Roosevelt said, "that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something across the windows."

As it turns out, the government must have read Zinsser’s book. How else would plainlanguage.gov have come about?

He’d probably approve of their reading list, as well.