OLW 2017

This is my first time choosing One Little Word. Last year was the first time I learned about the idea and read some of the posts about people's choices and reasons.

In choosing my word, I wanted a word that would influence all parts of my life, not just my teaching life. I am concerned about the mood in the United States and about many of the problems in other parts of the world. It always seems like, what can I do? I'm just one person. But on the other hand, I belong to many communities. I am a teacher and can influence my students.

The word I choose for 2017 is bridge.

The more I thought about it, the more places in my life I saw that a bridge could be helpful. In my teaching, I need to build bridges so that all my students can be successful, whether that means helping develop a positive class community, reaching out to parents, or providing help to students to bridge the gaps in their skills.

We have a chasm separating groups in this country now. We desperately need to build some bridges. I had already decided to not contribute to the divide, by not participating in any of the memes or conversations in social media that ridicule one side or another. But silence doesn't build a bridge. I am thinking how I could try for a wobbly little footbridge by talking civilly to people who I do not agree with. Perhaps, "I don't understand this viewpoint. Can you tell me what is important to you in this issue?"

Bridges to other people: I have trouble talking with people, even people I know well, so talking to strangers is quite a challenge. I have always enjoyed the chance conversations with strangers when they spring up. To help me with this bridge, I am going to read the highly recommended book, When Strangers Meet: How People You Don't Know Can Transform You.  There's also a TED talk!

Life bridges: As I look ahead, I know I won't always be teaching, at least full time, in a school. I will be thinking about a bridge to another stage in my life. What do I want to do after this stage? It's an exciting thought.

I will be staying aware, to see more bridging opportunities in 2017.

The Want-to-do List

Last week I was still in school and between the craziness of the holidays, hyped-up kids, and a culminating presentation that included 4th graders cooking, I kept thinking about what I wanted on my list of things to do while on break. I didn't have time or energy to write anything down last week, but I finally did once I was on break. Some of my list items are the boring "catch up with cleaning" and "take the cat to the vet," but others are more fun. Here's a sample:

1. Try to win $10 Hamilton tickets! I have wanted to see the musical Hamilton since it opened in NYC, but the ticket prices combined with living in Chicago pushed that into the future. But now Hamilton has opened in Chicago! Tickets are still hard to get, but they have a daily lottery online -- enter and you might win 2 $10 tickets! The cheapest tickets available for tonight's show are $327 -- compare to $10! A friend of mine won this lottery a couple of weeks ago and his tickets were in the first row!! He got actor saliva on him! I tried today, didn't win, but there are more days in this vacation.

2. Take the Google Level 1 certification test. My school is trying for a "moonshot," to get the whole faculty Google certified. We've had coaching and seminars and I have been studying. On January 6 a group of us is getting together to support each other and take the test. To be followed by a celebration, of course.

3. Investigate Minecraft. This one was a short trip to a roadblock. I wanted to use Minecraft, that enormously popular building game, to create a colonial town as we begin to study 18th century America. I had seen an article on how to do this. However, the first thing I found out when I began looking into Minecraft is that Minecraft and chromebooks are incompatible. Yes, you can use some hacks to get it to work, but these are school chromebooks. Waiting to hear what the tech guys say about any possibilities.

4. Try new recipes. I like to cook, especially when I'm not tired or rushed. So I made four different kinds of cookies, including three new recipes! Today I sent off boxes of cookies to my mother in Minnesota and my daughter in Texas. Delicious! Here's one of my new favorites, Gingerbread Chocolate Chunk Biscotti.

5. Practice. I play French horn in several community groups, so practicing is always important. I have been asked to play in an orchestra that I have not played with before and they're quite a good group. The piece is Beethoven Symphony #9. The part that I am playing is not that difficult, but I want to do a good job, of course. The thing about horn parts in pieces written before about 1850 is that they were written for horns without valves -- valves hadn't been invented. So horn players changed key by putting in different tubing. What this means for modern horn players, who have valves on their horns, is that we have to transpose the parts. My part in Beethoven 9th is written in Bb, Eb, and D, meaning I have transpose the notes on the page down a 5th, down a step, and down a minor 3rd, respectively. Why don't they just publish transposed parts now that we have valves? I could write a whole blog post about that, so for now I'll just say, the reasons are complicated. For now, I need to practice the Bb transposition because I haven't done that one in awhile.

Meanwhile, I'm also playing in a jazz band at my school for our Martin Luther King Jr. celebration. We're playing a challenging piece by Charles Mingus. Talk about a contrast in styles!

6. Eat at my favorite Chinese restaurant, Lao Sze Chuan! Fortunately for us in the northwest suburbs, there are now at least five locations of Lao Sze Chuan, including two that aren't ridiculously far away. Crispy Shrimp with Lemon Sauce, Sole in Black Bean Sauce, Szechuan Green Beans .... mmmm. We're going for dinner tomorrow!!

There's more on my list, things that will give me a feeling of accomplishment, but these are the experiences I have been looking forward to.

Playing in Vacant Lots: Childhood

Drying off after a shower, I noticed that the scar had faded significantly. It had been five inches of bright, angry pink for a long time. I hadn't thought about it in years and now it is barely visible.

I was about 10 years old. It was summer, a hot, sunny day when if you were a kid, you went outside and stayed outside until you got hungry or your mom called you home. I was playing with a friend from school in a vacant lot. Our small town had many empty lots where weeds grew. We could find milkweed plants and caterpillars or play pretend games. My friend and I were running and jumping through the weeds when my leg scraped against a nail sticking out of a piece of wood. There was a long line of blood on my calf.

I don't remember it hurting much, but everyone knew that rusty nails were no good. You usually had to go get a shot at the doctor's office after a rusty nail encounter. I didn't want to get a shot, but I also didn't want to have to show my mom. I knew she would be upset. I'm not sure if she would be upset that I was carelessly playing in a vacant lot or upset about harm to me. But I didn't want to go home with my bleeding leg.

My friend offered to take me to her mother, so that's where we went. Her mom was calm and washed it off while talking to me, put something on it and bandaged it. When I went home with everything cleaned up, my mom was okay with the whole thing. I was relieved.

Thinking back now on the incident, I still remember that my mother would react so strongly to any harm to me, my sister, and my brother. I shied away from her reaction as a kid, tried to avoid it. Since we all grew up, our mother has been telling us more about her childhood and how she felt as a mother. Because of her upbringing -- her father died when she was two, so she was the only child of a high-strung mother -- she never felt confident as a mother. She really did a fine job of raising us, but I now realize why she would get so upset when something like my minor injury happened, and my heart goes out to her.

Holidays, childhood and food

When I was growing up we had many traditions surrounding Christmas and a number of them featured food. My family is mostly of Norwegian descent and so we would have Norwegian meatballs (yes, they are different than Swedish meatballs, it's in the spices.), a sweet soup made with dried fruit, Yulekake and krumkake. We also always had Norwegian lefse.

My parents always ordered the lefse from Minnesota. What is it? Lefse is in the crepe family. It's made from mashed potatoes, flour, and some milk or cream. They are paper-thin pancakes, usually around 12 inches in diameter, off white with brown spots. Many Norwegian-Americans eat them spread with butter and rolled up. (I have heard that modern Norwegians in Norway do not eat lefse.) My family always ate them with butter and sugar, especially brown sugar.

I found a place in Door County, Wisconsin, that makes and ships lefse. I ordered two packages. They have to be shipped quickly because it is perishable. When my package arrived I ran around the house showing it to my husband and adult son. "Look! The lefse came!" My husband is a Chicagoan and does not care for lefse, neither does my son. That's okay, other people do not need to share my enthusiasm for a food from my childhood.

I opened one of the packages and immediately the aroma brought me back to my childhood. I could taste it before I actually ate it. I could hear, faintly, the records that my dad would play at this time of year, and feel the warmth of our house, the fire in the fireplace, my mother cooking in the cheerful, tidy kitchen.

It is indeed as Proust observed, that a single taste can take us back to childhood.

I ate my lefse with butter and brown sugar and it was good.

"When Books Went to War" and my Dad went too

I read the book When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning last week. The topic is the efforts to provide books to the armed forces -- every soldier, sailor and marine -- in World War II. I had no idea about this aspect of WWII until I read the review in the New York Times and decided to get the book.

This book is extremely well researched and covers the beginning of the movement to provide books to the troops through book drives and then continues with the creation of the Armed Services Editions. The effort was partly in response to the Nazi book burnings in Germany and partly to provide entertainment and comfort to the U.S. troops. These were special editions that were designed to be lightweight and fit easily into a soldier's pocket. The list of titles that were printed is extensive and covers many genres. The books were distributed everywhere -- the battle fronts in Europe, hospitals, every Pacific island where servicemen were stationed, and even to prisoners of war.

The books were enormously popular, with men lined up to get new books when a shipment arrived. Soldiers wrote to authors to thank them and talk about how certain stories, like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, reminded them of home and why they were fighting. From the soldiers' own words, it is clear how essential they found the books.

World War II was, of course, a time before personal computers, smart phones, video games, streaming, and all the other distractions of modern life. When Books Went to War is a look into a different time when provided a personal space in a crowded barracks, ship, or foxhole. Many of the men wrote that they had never read much before the Armed Services Editions. Many of these soldiers took advantage of the GI Bill after the war to get an education and become professionals.

I thought about my dad, who served in World War II as a Navy officer, first in the Atlantic and then in the Pacific. He must have read some of these books. He never talked about the war or what he had done as a naval officer on a sub chaser. The little bit I know I learned after he died from my mother. In my experience it seems like veterans of WWII either never want to talk about their experiences or they want to talk at every opportunity. I think both responses are attempts to process a traumatic experience.

The more I thought about the book, the more I could imagine how my dad might have felt. Manning writes that after V-E day, the troops in Europe thought they were done and would be going home. Many of them had been fighting for three or four years already. Instead, they found they were either reassigned to the Pacific or would continue in Europe to assist in post-war rebuilding. I wonder if my dad had felt that way -- wishing to go home but instead being sent to the Pacific. I also learned how brutal the Pacific war was -- never-ending bombing, tropical heat, swarms of insects. How much of that would he have experienced on a ship? What would he have been reading? I imagine him choosing the nonfiction selections -- maybe reading history, and then towards the end of the war, reading some of the books that were intended to help soldiers transition in civilian life. I could imagine him reading Ernie Pyle, and books about political systems.

I will never know for sure, but I felt closer to my dad while reading When Books Went to War.

Energizing Writing

I have been trying, over the past two years or so, to change up the way I teach writing in order to engage students more. My school had purchased the Lucy Calkins Units of Study years ago and I used them to teach personal narrative and essay writing every year. I also teach poetry and research skills that end with a report.

As much as I liked the approach to writing in the Units of Study, it took such a long time to do one unit. I know they're supposed to take a month, but it always took me and my teaching partner much longer. And I didn't feel that my students were enthusiastic about writing, even though they were good at it.

So I started reading blogs about writing and teaching writing, like Two Writing teachers. I dipped into Teachers Write and the Facebook discussion group on Craft Moves. I took the March challenge from Two Writing Teachers to blog every day. I attended a seminar given by Kristina Smekens on teaching language arts. And I started to follow the plans in the Units of Study less.

As I became more relaxed, writing time became more enjoyable for the students AND me.

This year innovation is the goal at my school, not necessarily using technology, but using more technology is also a goal. We started off with personal narratives as usual, then my partner and I were told about the Scholastic writing contest just for 4th grade students, Flaunt Your Differences. That segued well with the personal narratives, so we both took some time with have our students write three-paragraph pieces explaining and celebrating what makes each of them different.

Next, we started class Twitter accounts and challenged students to write 140 character tweets documenting our social studies "voyage" on the Mayflower. (You can follow us here!)

Then a happy chance found an idea for creating a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story by using Google slides. Even before I showed my class the example, they were expressing their delight. "We get to write fiction?!" "I LOVE choose your own adventure!!" "We can put in pictures, too?!" "We can share these?!" Fourth graders are so much fun!

We got started by having each student decide on a genre of fiction, consider who the main character would be, keeping in mind that the main character is the reader, and think about a story arc. I asked them to make a simple flow chart to track where there would be choices for the reader to make and what the alternate strands of the story would be. We will work on craft moves as they write their stories -- engaging leads, dialogue, and satisfying endings (multiple!). They are excited, I am excited. You can find the sample and the directions we will be using here.

Election Memories

I was in elementary school when the Johnson-Goldwater presidential race occurred. My most vivid memory of this time is at recess when the older elementary kids would form two lines facing each other and shout, "Johnson!" "Goldwater!" "Johnson!" Goldwater!" at each other for most of recess.

I don't know how this started. None of us had a clue about the issues in the race. We knew who our parents were going to vote for, and that was enough to set us to shouting at each other.

I've thought a lot about this memory in recent weeks. One thing I thought is, what a waste of recess time. Of course, the reason this memory popped up in my mind is all the shouting that has been going on in this year's campaign for president. A lot of shouting, two very divided sides, not much listening.

After the election, though, things seemed to go on as usual. Johnson was accepted without questioning as president, whether or not you voted for him or agreed with him. I learned much later in life that Goldwater was considered a dangerous candidate by many. Would things have been different if he had been elected? Who knows. The election process was a given, and our president might be criticized, but he was also respected as our president.

It is my hope that we, the American people, will again embrace our election process and go forward with a new president. We are so lucky to have the right to vote.