More On Writing

A couple months ago, near the end of the “Becoming a Better Teacher” series, I wrote about I told about my initial participation in what was then called the Southeast Iowa Writing Project. That was really only the beginning to the transformation I was to undergo as a teacher.

Lately, I have looked back in a folder that has many of the pieces I wrote during that time. They are pretty much horrible and I plan to destroy most of them after I finish this piece. Don’t worry you aren’t missing anything. I will keep the all of the journals I have written and there is plenty of lousy writing in them, too, but there are also little seeds of pieces, a turn of a phrase, or a provocative thought so they will still be around. Don’t take any of the journals too seriously, though.

I will describe a few of the pieces before they disappear. I do have to say that for me (a save everything guy) that it is hard for me to throw things away. That is not the case with these!

Included is a rambling treatise on my early thoughts about the class and hunting fossils. I don’t know why I went that direction but I did. Another is a short poem:

Yard Sale
Slightly used
Grown out of clothes
Shade less lamps
Some who-know?
A delicate teacup
Without a saucer…

Hmmm... Ok, I think I just ran out of ideas or energy on that one. There are some more attempts at poetry. None any better than this one.

The folder includes a hand written draft of the first major piece I wrote, Beautiful Big Thompson. It is about us being involved in the catastrophic flood in the Big Thompson Canyon during one of the summer trips. It still has all of the positive response to it that the members of the class wrote on the attached piece of paper. I’ll keep it for that reason.

There is a piece of paper titled “Random Thoughts.” Nothing much to them except maybe one thought, “Maybe we don’t write often enough to speak or speak often enough to write.”

There is an attempt at describing the experience of climbing Longs Peak and a rambling tongue in cheek piece about night crawlers. There is the mention that I should use letter writing in my classroom. I ended up doing that and had tremendous success! I’ll tell more about that later.

“And retreating to more tested ground, I have lost what I had found.” Don’t remember what I was thinking with that one?

More poems and prayers and promising ideas. And, finally, typed on a cut out piece of a paper grocery bag:

Confused by the complexities of the cornered conscience
I search and sort and tabulate
And again I cannot find the word that eludes my mind
And so I sort and calculate
And find the rhythms wrong.
So what? You say did you do next
To elevate the absurd?
I left out the word.

Maybe I should have left out a lot more words? I will tell you a little about journaling next time.