Learning. Learning. Learning. It's magic.
I have many thanks to give this morning, however, to Mary Rand Hess, coauthor of Solo with Kwame Alexander. Her kindness, generosity, enthusiasm, wit, playfulness, sincerity and love of writing radiates from the SKYPE screen and the 30-minutes she spent with my pre-service teachers is extremely appreciated (especially reading selections from Solo that were cut with explanations that result from the editing process).
The course I teach asks graduate students to think about the teaching of writing and I paired Solo as the YA selection to ask my students to think of the multiple genres such a text might employ. We filled a whiteboard with the possibilities, and didn't even get to the poetic potential:
- research on musicians,
- narratives of a time when one went solo,
- reflections on being parented,
- essays on travel,
- unwritten chapters,
- writing from a character's point of view,
- tales of loss,
- actions to take globally,
etc. etc. etc. Students are heading into narrative writing next week and will be sharing their own stories of learning from experience and telling stories of unforgettable moments, life lessons, photographs, and music (we have Ralph Fletcher to thank for that).
Mary Rand Hess, however, is a teacher's writer. She told the graduate students to be "brave" with their writing and to not worry about editing until there's a need to worry about editing, "Just write." She shared what she learned when traveling to Ghana, discussed what it was like to coauthor a project, and hinted at writing she's currently doing.
There's a synergy that comes from the writer/teacher/storytelling/artist connection and visits by remarkable individuals like Mary Rand Hess make my mini-lessons that more tangible, authentic, and purposeful. I'm forever thankful and I cannot send enough rounds of applause (I can only think about the gift she presented to us when speaking to us last night). Kudos. All love. Oh, Great Whatever, All love.
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