owp05

Strong Arms

Strong Arms

I am five in this first memory, sitting on my father’s shoulders, short brown legs dangling joyfully. As we approach the eating hall, I jump down and run to the line of children standing in front of an elderly man.

He smiles as each child proudly steps up and makes a fist, flexing his or her arm. “Very good,” he says, gently patting a budding round muscle. Then the next child steps up, awaiting the similar affirmation. When it is my turn, I squeeze as hard as I can and glory in the ritual.

My Uncle Irving

My Uncle Irving

    My uncle Irving, eighty six years old, is shutting down.  He looms large in my world, a monolith, wide sloping back and piercing grey-blue eyes.  His two younger brothers, my father and Uncle Ben, have both died.  The three together held up my world on their broad shoulders.
    The political landscape of the larger world has been his domain for so many years.  A sepia tinted photograph of my uncle as a young boy, three perhaps, shows him wearing a white suite with a floppy bow. His round face, topped with a blonde Buster Brown hair cut, is serious. His mother has a firm hand on his shoulder as if to say “Don’t you dare move.” The picture is populated with other family members, distant adult cousins and their children sitting in front of a painted bucolic background, a façade. When I look closely at Irving’s little boy stance I see his left hand is in the shape of a fist- the determined gesture the only hint of a life that would be filled with over sixty years of fighting in a political arena for the disenfranchised, the underdog, the voiceless, and the downtrodden. 
 

Making Revision Matter by Janet Angelillo

    Revision, one of the harder aspects of the writing process to teach middle school students is nicely broken down by Janet Angelillo in Making Revision Matter.  Angelillo provides clues on what to teach based on what the teacher is seeing in the student's work and phases the lessons so that students address only a small group of related strategies at once. 
    Angelillo includes uselful examples of books that students can use to look at traits of good writing as well as forms at the back of the book.  Highly recommended

Chocolate Unwrapped, Paper #3

      

                                         Chocolate Unwrapped

Author’s Note:  I wrote this piece because I wanted the experience of
writing an expository paper - a category of writing which is difficult to teach
because, ironically, there is too much information. My students tend to cut and
paste from the internet and call it a report.
    I also wanted to try writing something in the style of Michael Pollan’s
The Botany of Desire, a book which uses multiple points of view to weave a
history of four  plants: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. I found
it very helpful  to ask the question “ How did he do that ?” as I riffled
through the book and, while I adopted some of his formatting in this chocolate
piece, the voice is my own.  Pollan spent up to a year researching just one of
his plant topics - I spent just a few days reading several books on the history
and processing of chocolate.  There is no comparison between his work and mine
in terms of his prodigious talent and broad scope.  But I learned a lot -
much with the intention of turning over the question “How did he/she do that?”
to my students.

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    My stock broker friend, Sam, who helps me decide where to invest the
small inheritance I received following my father’s death, recently suggested
buying shares in a British owned company: Cadberry Schweppes. I responded favorably
not because I knew anything about the history or health of the company, or
the price to earnings ratio - but because, unlike some of his other suggested
stock picks, I at least could associate a familiar product with each name:
Cadberry, I knew, made delicious chocolate and Schweppes made the tonic soda I
bought during the summer months.
    I teased Sam about his choice, remembering his epicurean love of good
wine and good chocolate.  But he said it was purely a good investment and I
agreed to buy 200 shares.  I didn’t think anything more about it until Kate, Sam’s
wife, made a remark about visiting her husband’s office and finding a tall
stack of rectangular chocolate bars sitting next to the legal pads, paper clips,
and boxes of Bic pens.  Kate has been married to Sam for twenty four years,
mostly happily married, yet the uneaten bars, clothed in Trader Joe’s brown and
orange wrapping, completely surprised her.
    I knew that Sam’s obsession with chocolate, or what I interpreted as an
obsession, was hardly unique.  A lot of chocolate, thirteen billion dollars
worth, is sold in the United States and, I assume, eaten with either or both
pleasure and guilt.  Chocolate desserts certainly seem to disappear first at
dinner gatherings I attend.  And yet on Sam’s white shelves, a pile of chocolate
lay untouched, thwarting all the human effort that went into their production.
What type of passion was my investment, admittedly small, supporting ?
    The geometry of neat piles on shelves, ordered rows in stores, and the
grid of city streets fades away when you travel to the beginning of chocolate.
Imagine instead a steamy jungle where, among vines and tall trees. you spy a
strange understory tree growing. The tree,Theobrama cacao, is bearing large
pendulous  fruit right from the trunk.  No two fruit are the same -some have
ridges, some furrowed, while others are smooth and shiny, and the colors range
from bright green to pale yellow, dark purple to burnt orange or crimson red.
The tree called food of the gods cacao, in Latin, needs to be in this mix of
small and large shade trees, along with many vines and climbing plants springing
up all around, in order to have protection from the hot sun. The plant layers
also support the complex insect life so crucial for pollination leading to
fruit production - the source of the bean which eventually turns into chocolate.
    Unlike corn or tomatoes whose harvest ends with the first hard freeze,
cacao trees are in constant production. A tree will begin flowering diminutive
orchid like blossoms that turn into pendulous fruit when it is about four years
old, and continues putting forth thousands of flowers throughout the year
although only about one hundred will survive to become a pod. Once a cacao
blossom is successfully pollinated, it takes five to six months to become a mature
fruit.  The farmers have to keep track of each fruit as it approaches ripeness
- because the colors vary so widely, it takes an experienced eye to know when
a green, yellow, or dark purple fruit is ready to be harvested.
    I thought of this daily walk through the layers of jungle green,
remembering where each fruit approaching ripeness hung, as I watered my own small
tomato crop and peeked under the luxurious zucchini leaves hiding the star shaped
yellow flowers.
I resist the drip systems or automated sprinklers that my friends are so
proud of. I know I’m not necessarily being water wise, but I like the hand held
hose, a chance to keep track of each green tomato, to bemoan the sterile flower,
and delight in the baby cucumber.  The daily bath attaches me - for a few
short months I can pretend to be a farmer, both vulnerable and fecund.
     But cacao farms are not run on sentiment or pretense. The growing and
harvesting is usually a family affair.  Typically the men do the clearing and
heavy cutting while the women tend and harvest the fruit.  Once the pods are
picked and opened, the process of fermentation begins. An opened pod reveals a
sticky glistening pulp which surround the beans and keeps them moist.  It is
this white mass which turns into acetic acid, vinegar, when exposed to air and
heat.  The low pH softens the cacao bean, kills the germ and embryo inside, and
allows some of the bitter and astringent compounds in the bean to pass through
the now permeable skins.  After the beans are fermented, they are dried,
classified according to size, placed in a burlap bags, then weighed and sold off
to a buyer, usually a broker acting as an intermediary between the farmers and
the manufacturers.
       The time I spent with my son watching Mr. Rogers’ clips of how crayons
are made helped me invision the next stage of chocolate development.  I
imagine long conveyer belts and big gleaming vats of rich gooey mush with helpful
looking people sparsely placed along the labyrinth, delicate nets covering
their hair, and lab coats giving them the air of a ‘technician’. The pictures in
my Chocolate resources indicate that I’m not too far off.
    When the beans arrive at a manufacturer ( perhaps Cadbury) they go
through a machine which cleans and roasts them and then sends them off to be have
the hulls - the outside shells,  separated from the nibs inside.  The nibs, the
source of chocolate, are crushed in high speed mills and ground into cacao
liquor composed of cacao butter and cacao solids.  The brown gritty mass is then
further refined to break down the size of the particles.   
    It is at this point that human obsession begins: the liquor is now ready
to turn into what we know of as chocolate. Crucial ingredients such as
vanilla, sugar , and often lecithin are mixed in.  The dark chocolate paste gets
beaten into a powder like substance and then kneaded and agitated some more to
mellow, and round out the texture and flavor.  Many manufacturers add back some
of the cacao butter at this point to give the chocolate the rich satiny finish
so pleasing to the tongue. The chocolate is piped into tempering machines and
then into molds the size of the finished bar. The bars pass through a cooling
tunnel and the emerging chocolate, solid and shiny goes off to be wrapped.
    It is easy to loose sight of chocolate’s allure  by describing the
production process. Discovering that chocolate contains, albeit in very small
quantities,  caffeine, theobromine, serotonin, and phenylethylamine also don’t
explain its pull on the senses - although these substances collectively act as
antidepressents,  anti-stress agents and enhance pleasurable activities.
Sweetness alone, a built in preference in human beings is only a part of it although
seeing my daughter’s response to chocolate ever since she was very little makes
me think that the other part could be a genetic marker for chocolate
attraction.
    I found out that the Cadbury part of the stock I bought was started by a
John Cadbury in the 1800’s. John, a Quacker, opened up a coffe and tea shop in
Birmingham, England where he also sold the traditional chocolate drink. He
eventually expanded the chocolate part of the business and in 1853 obtained the
royal privilege as purveyor of chocolate to Queen Victoria.  It was Cadbury
who introduced the first “chocolate box” containing chocolate candies and
decorated with a quaint picture of  his daughter with a kitten. It was also Cadbury
who is credited with the invention of the first Valentine’s Day candy box
celebrating romantic love. 
    The strength of a culture is it’s ability to adapt - to pull in outside
traditions and weave them into the existing fabric.  Chocolate, Theobroma cacao
, food of the gods cacao, keeps feeding us with imagery and associations. It
is a food woven in with a history of human desires; a confection picked,
fermented, ground, mixed, and poured into a mold ending as a brown bar lying quietly
on a shelf, waiting for someone to rip open the paper and take a bite.

Paper #4, Reflections

Reflections   -    Paper #4
Chava Beinin

     From the first week the 2005 Oregon Writing Project  met, I was struck
by the dedicated and intelligent group assembled - not only were my fellow
teachers devoting four weeks of vacation to sitting in a classroom, but they were
all grappling with how to best teach their discipline.  My classmates seemed
hardworking, thoughtful, and compassionate.  If I had to be inside, this was a
good group to be with.
    As the presentations began, and especially with those by the elementary
teachers working with younger children, I was reminded of how much fun hands-
on activities are.  Because I teach reading and writing to middle students and
we work with traits, and modes, and genres and scoring guides....I forget
sometimes, many times, to bring in the element of play.  Yes, writing can be
enjoyable and I make my lessons interactive and engaging, but I would like to weave
in the element of play and experimentation.  Middle School is the last
academic stop of  childhood - a time when the GPA doesn’t yet count college is still
too far off. I need to remember to paint with my students, to have them write
and read poetry without needing to identify poetic vocabulary terms, and to
mix up their grouping on a consistent basis throughout the year - long after
they have habituated to their customary seat and location.
    The Friday presentations, one by William Strong, the other by Ingrid
Wendt, were particularly enjoyable and applicable.  I grappled with teaching
sentence combining and sentence fluency with several of my students this past year.
Had I known Bill’s sentence combining strategies, I could have been more
successful.  I’m excited to try out his ideas - I think my students will both
enjoy the process and learn how to prevent the choppy syntax that plagues several
of them repeatedly.
    I teach a fair amount of poetry with my year long students and present
many of the exercises Ingrid modeled.  What I learned though from her
presentation though were several instructional strategies that I haven’t yet resolved.
The first is reading the student’s poem myself. I’ve had the “author’s
chair” model which hasn’t been very successful. It is very liberating to know that
an effective way to share student’s poetry is  for me to simply read it.
Ingrid’s presentation also suggested the need to model poetic language more than I
do ( a pencil is...),  not to burden the students with word choice, and to
give clear explicit directions about not rhyming.  I love poetry and I love
teaching poetry - what I gleaned from her energized me to continue.

    Working on my own writing has been a highlight of the class.  All year
long I teach about effective leads and endings, word choice, vivid language, and
the revision process. And yet during the school year, I rarely read books and
even less frequently write something other than a response to e-mail queries.
With a steady stream of papers and projects to read and respond to, I just
don’t have the time. But writing now, this summer, I could sense my teaching
permeating my work.
    One particular example is the memoir piece I wrote about my uncle Irving.
It was the demands of the form - the need to create a foreshadowing metaphor
to wind through the entire piece - which pushed me to find the image of the
fist in the photograph of my uncle as a young boy. I was writing about a person
whom I love, but I was also crafting  a cohesive and, I hoped, a compelling
whole.  It was interesting to watch myself in the process too because when I
began the piece, I wasn’t sure how it would turn out.  I had assembled some of
the parts, some research on the internet for quotes, certainly a collection of
memories... and then I remembered the photograph hanging inside a gold frame in
the hallway and I brought that into the mix.   I haven’t thought of the
writing process as a  puzzle before but it certainly has similar elements -  I
didn’t know how it would all fit together, but I knew if I sat with it long
enough, I would resolve the question of what to put in and what to leave out, and
how propel the narrative forward while giving it a satisfying ending.
    A similar process happened in the expository chocolate piece - although
the writing was more demanding because it involved research and explanations
about an unfamiliar topic.  While I very consciously used Michael Pollan and his
book The Botany of Desire as a reference, I wasn’t at all sure about how I
would weave in a personal narrative. I couldn't going  off traipsing to South
America - the way he would - and use the traveling as the narrative dialogue.
But by obsessing about the topic, writing a paragraph and then watering my
garden, writing another paragraph and walking the dog, and thinking about how to
interject the first person throughout, I was able to come up with enough to
hold it together.  It is artifice to some extent, but it is also like pulling a
string and watching where it goes, where the imagery and points of reference
intersect.
    ‘How do I know what I think till I see what I say’ is a quote I have
hanging in my classroom.  Having time, and a little push to write so I can see
what I say, have been the gift of these past few weeks. And I’m more trusting
now that, as with a New York Times crossword puzzle, a very pleasurable
obsession,  if I sit there thinking long and hard enough... I’ll come up with
something.