youland

Add to my all-time favorite books Mattland, by Hazel Hutchins and Gail Herbert (published in Canada).  I have long been a fan of Roxaboxen and its depiction of a kind of collaborative, creative, imaginative play that today's children sometimes need to be taught.  Mattland is the same kind of story, but a little more accessible and step-by-step than Roxaboxen, and with a dramatic crisis that the true story of Roxaboxen lacks.  (I have my little complaints about the design of Mattland and how the illustrations sometimes don't match the words in shape or placement, but these are surmounted by the powerfully satisfying overall effect.)

We read both these books as a way of coming to an understanding of the "physical features: landforms and bodies of water" that are in the Kindergarten curriculum.  We worked up to building modeling clay landscapes on lunch trays, with little toothpick flags to indicate mountains, lakes, deserts, rivers, grasslands, oceans and islands.  We called the project "Youland," since most children, like Matt in the book, named their place after themselves, and they were very proud of their lands indeed.  It took me way too long to realize what song we needed to learn:  Woody Guthrie's folk classic below.  Did you know all the verses?

This Land Is Your Land

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me.

I roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
While all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

by Woody Guthrie

And now, enjoy this Youtube version which links Woody's cultural/political message with our National Parks system...

Sing your way to the Poetry Friday Round-up at The Iris Chronicles with Karissa.

"paying no heed to the biting cold wind"

The biting cold wind of middle age has swept in, and there is no doubt that my middle-aged brain can't do what it used to. I used to walk into a classroom each year and learn 25 names in 30 seconds; now I need nametags and at least 30 minutes, and the names I do know tend to hover tantalizingly just above my tongue at the moment I need them most. However, I've been noticing a different memory phenomenon that puzzles me a little. 

I spent time this week in my daughter's fifth grade classroom talking about poetry as memoir. To mirror the young writers' process, I wrote a fresh new memoir poem for their critique. (I'm sharing below the draft I took in yesterday before their questions, comments and suggestions showed me many ways to improve it.) Once I got going on this poem, I had no trouble at all accessing strong physical and emotional memories of the way my friend and I played. I have deep wells of detailed memory from the years between 5 and 14--not comprehensive by any means, and only sort of chronological--which have fed my writing over the last ten years. 

But I just allowed my 25th college reunion to pass without me, partly because of a kind of embarrassment about what I don't remember (and what classmates I know seem to remember quite clearly and easily). Is there really a difference between the way I experienced things at 10 and at 20 and then again at 30? Some difference in intensity, some difference in the quality or mode of recording memories at different ages? Or does it have something to do with writing itself? 

At 10 I was a writer, but by 15, even, I was recording my life in journals and poems and term papers and letters, and by 25 practically everything in my life went on paper somehow: lesson plans, travel packing lists, favorite songs, budgets.... Maybe it has always been, since 15, the way it is now: I write it down so that I don't have to actively remember it. I decided long ago that, after the kids themselves, our family diaries are what I'd take if the house were burning down. It's a good trick, but it makes me sad to think that in committing these experiences to paper I am perhaps erasing them from my mind. 

 <poem redacted>

poetry as a second language

First I must express right up top my gratitude to Kate Coombs at BookAunt, to Tricia Stohr-Hunt at The Miss Rumphius Effect and to Gregory K. at Gotta Book for their generous and careful attention to my work during this month of poetry festivities. Apart from anything else, I just love the feeling of being part of this community! Thanks to all who make it be.

My classroom is a little community in itself: surrounded by books (since it used to be the Reading Specialist's headquarters), I am one of four teachers who use it daily. I arrive as another, exemplary "Reading Initiative" teacher is finishing with her second-graders, and as I'm wrapping up my first-grade teaching session at 12:30, two ESOL teachers are preparing to conduct their small groups (often simultaneously!). We do pretty well at sharing our slice of real estate, and all this eavesdropping on other teachers is very educational. It's had other influences, too, and tomorrow morning I'll take the ESOL Praxis exam to become certified to teach ESOL as well as general education.

Meanwhile, as our public charter school Founding Group prepares for a Q&A session with the school district's review panel, I come to the section in our application on provision for students who are speakers of English as an additional language. Here's the poem by Gregory Djanikian that opens this section:

How I Learned English

It was in an empty lot
Ringed by elms and fir and honeysuckle.
Bill Corson was pitching in his buckskin jacket,
Chuck Keller, fat even as a boy, was on first,
His t-shirt riding up over his gut,
Ron O’Neill, Jim, Dennis, were talking it up
In the field, a blue sky above them
Tipped with cirrus.

And there I was,
Just off the plane and plopped in the middle
Of Williamsport, Pa. and a neighborhood game,
Unnatural and without any moves,
My notions of baseball and America
Growing fuzzier each time I whiffed.

So it was not impossible that I,
Banished to the outfield and daydreaming
Of water, or a hotel in the mountains,
Would suddenly find myself in the path
Of a ball stung by Joe Barone.
I watched it closing in
Clean and untouched, transfixed
By its easy arc before it hit
My forehead with a thud.

I fell back,
Dazed, clutching my brow,
Groaning, “Oh my shin, oh my shin,”
And everybody peeled away from me
And dropped from laughter, and there we were,
All of us writhing on the ground for one reason
Or another.

Someone said “shin” again,
There was a wild stamping of hands on the ground,
A kicking of feet, and the fit
Of laughter overtook me too,
And that was important, as important
As Joe Barone asking me how I was
Through his tears, picking me up
And dusting me off with hands like swatters,
And though my head felt heavy,
I played on till dusk
Missing flies and pop-ups and grounders
And calling out in desperation things like
“Yours” and “take it,” but doing all right,
Tugging at my cap in just the right way,
Crouching low, my feet set.
“Hum baby” sweetly on my lips.

~ Gregory Djanikian

Why is it so hard for big school systems to allow that Play Is Learning?