Wow!! Is it really the end?

No, I think it's safe to say that this is just the beginning, certainly for me. I can also say that something has awakened in me in these past three weeks in SI, and I love it. The immersion of writing was so intimidating at first, now, I can't stop writing, don't want to stop, and seek opportunities to just write...what has happened to me?

I am a writer, that's what. 

Make:

I have developed a deep connection to writing, reflection, and just being. As I reflect back on these three weeks, I am amazed at how much we learned, wrote and played - I like to "make" and play ..... A LOT!! The humor and laughter was infections and constant - in discussions, posts and our creations: 

The concept of "make" to me is new, and I am eager to integrate as much as I can with my curriculum. 

Ah-ha Moments:

There have been numerous ah-ha moments for me, but the two I will address are: Other-Monica's test scare (psych!!) and Katie's statement that students are (small) humans too (wow!!) -  we all need to fidget, eat randomly, and wander aimlessly My Ah-ha moment. From reflecting and writing about these two specific demos and the epiphanies that resulted, I better understand how my students must feel in these circumstances. They were both very eye-opening, and I will be much more cognizant of filtering the constant barrage of test - test - test -Test -TEST that emanates from administration - there really is so much more to students, and ourselves, than that damn test!! Thank you, Suli Breaks for your insightful video, "I will Not Let an Exam Result Decide My Fate." I will gladly be sharing this with my charges in August.

The Danger of a Single story:

As we learned, it is dangerous to to assume a single story about anyone; it generate stereotypes, misunderstandings and causes judgement and prejudice. Other-Monica makes excellent points in her post on July 8: Other-Monica's insight into the danger of a single story where she questions the fact that ALL students are assessed using the same major test at the end of the year and how ludicrous that is. Randy and the comments on his posting: Randy - July 8, further articulate and reinforce this same notion about the danger so the single story. I loved how Erin recalled the statement in Adichie's video that she had just read American Psycho and inferred that all Americans, based on the the "single story" idea, must be psychos - hilarious!! 

Writing Community: Although I have students peer review, work in groups, and sometimes collaborate on assignments, for the first time, I felt like a real member of a writing community. I loved all of the collaborative writing assignments we worked on, and how these various assignments really connected us as writers and how we were able to learn form each other. One of my favorites was the exploration of inquiry topics connected with yarn:

 I thought this was so revealing and was able to see the path my group members followed to get to their point of inquiry. The yarn allowed us to connect the points as we  interpreted them. Also,  Dorene's Post - July 9 is a great discussion of how she views the importance of group work in her classes, and Katie - July 8 makes great connections to the writing community: it both encompasses and extends beyond the classroom and includes school literacy night for parents to get involved with their children's reading and writing progress. Her inquiry is fascinating.

 The Wobble: 

Ah, how we've all wobbled over the past three weeks - where to even begin? Randy enters his inquiry with a wobble, Emilia also wobbles with her inquiry topic, Lacy wobbles over Cindy's rubric talk, Randy's back to wobbling, this time about a wobbling article (how meta), Maggie blogged about wobbling, as did GranVille, but with a story, and just about everywhere else I look there is wobbling. I know I wobbled over a couple of the theoretical composition articles - zzzzzzzzz..........

and finally, Punctuation and Grammar: and I LOVED these punctuation and grammar-licious topics. I have always been a grammar-geek, and Randy's demo and Lil's grammar-discussion today were great. Natasha had a great discussion of Randy's demo, and I absolutely loved the profile we created for our select, odd-ball punctuation mark - how clever. And most recently, I was very connected to Lil's presentation today, and her discussion really resonated with me. I can see how in the past I focused on the wrong things with students' writing, and I don't want to think that I would be responsible for having discouraged students from wanting to write - how ironic that would be. What really clicked with me was the way to look at lower-level issues with student writing, the workshopping activities, really reading and understanding what they wrote and why they wrote it. rather than getting so lost in the lower-level concerns. Next fall I plan on beginning my doctoral studies, and I think this will be the heart of my inquiry - student writing and to effectively teach grammar and lower level issues - still so much to work through, but this is such an intriguing and fascinating topic. 

And remember, punctuation saves lives, and we must all write good!!

Eat, Drink and be Merry!

Today was demo day for me!  It was great to see my fellow SIers indulging me in my food inquiry piece.  It is great to be surrounded by so many encouraging people looking into my food wanderings within an English class.  After the demo there were so many pieces I felt like I forgot to tell my fellow writers about.  This is definitely an inquiry that is going to be a work in progress for myself.  I know that looking at the recipe genre was a small portion of the overall piece of inquiry...but I think it was a great start!

Following today's class, it was great to socialize and just be with the Writing Project Gang.  The whole idea of creating a community of writers has so much to say about my time during the Writing Project.  Eat, drink and be merry is definitely a theme I see running through my head.  The more I look into the inquiry of food, the more relevant I believe this is in teaching and learning.

 

What is so funny about this inquiry is that now I see how it surrounded me.  In May I flew home for a wedding in Michigan and my mom and I ran out to lunch and poked around some of my favorite bookstores.  This is the one book that we found and she surprised me with it recently.  Two things to know about me:

 

1) I love things all Jane Austen and 2) I love things all Mr. Darcy

 

Needless to say this was the PERFECT cookbook for me!

 



 

I am going to link some ideas that I have surrounding my food inquiry.  Maybe they will be helpful or at least start to create a conversation about authentic work and discovery in the classroom.  Last blog post of the summer institute...EEK!

 

Food and Literature

Book Club Pairing

Class Syllabus on Food and Writing (MIT)

 

 

 



Thank you once again, Charlotte Observer, for my next inquiry into food. This one stems from the article from Monday's edition, "Camp helps disabled kids play with, eat foods they fear." This made me think about food phobias many of us have.I have known people over the years with food aversions - can't let foods touch, won't eat certain color foods, have various texture issues. Makes sense to me because I, for one, am horrified of the ends of food: ends of bread, pickles, and don't even get me started about the ends of hot dogs with their angry little puckers - See what I mean??!!:

 Ack!!

But what this article really made me think about is the healing qualities of so many foods. I have for so long considered and researched the harmful additives to many processed food; but I have just begun to learn about the amazing healing abilities of other foods. There are many super foods, like blue berries, for instance. They are high in antioxidants and they lower cholesterol and slow the aging process - sign me up for a bowl. Many of us are familiar with the benefits of eating salmon, broccoli, walnuts and dark chocolate (perhaps with some blueberries). But honey is also considered a super food - consuming local honey helps people with (local and seasonal) allergies, it aides in wound relief, and it is believed to have anti-bacterial and anti-viral qualities. 

I have also been very curious about the harmful effects of sugar on our bodies. It is so addictive (I am proof of that), and it is soooooo very bad for our bodies. I struggle on a daily basis to refrain from consuming that delicious, sweet, refined, granular love. Prevention magazine recently covered this topic. Below is the list of 11 bad effects sugar has on us from Prevention Magazine - "Weird Things Sugar's Doing to Your Body" :

1. sugar makes organs fat
2. sugar primes the body for diabetes 
3. sugar hammers the heart
4. sugar prevents tense blood vessels
5. sugar promotes cholesterol chaos
6. sugar leads to type 3 diabetes (yes, type 3)
7. sugar turns you into a junkie
8. sugar turns you into a ravenous animal
9. sugar makes you an energy starved zombie 
10. sugar turns your simile upside down
11. sugar wrecks your face

Makes me think.

Writing Into Their Lives

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting
--Edmund Burke 

Friday's demos from Karen and GranVille really had me thinking about authentic teaching and writing.  Last school year I changed school systems and was once again the "newbie".  This was a hard transition for me and I had to find ways of tweaking my teaching styles to fit the students, parents and teachers.  One aspect of my teaching that I did not include and regretted were independent book projects.  This use to be my bread and butter (food inquiry metaphor) of my classroom.  Reading and reflecting is what we need to have our students do, but we need to find ways in which we can connect them to their writing.

I think so much of my interest into the food inquiry is really about authentic writing.  Karen and GranVille both discussed in their demos about finding ways to connect with their students.  Use things (like music or free writes) to connect with students.  This is the root of my food inquiry.  I really want to find fresh ideas to connect with my students.  I want to have my students to start to inquire into their interests.  It might be food, music or sports; but I need to find a way to facilitate their writings into pieces that work for them and push them to write and write and write.


I have include a scene from Ratatouille.  This clip was a part of my original post, but I switched gears after Friday's demos.  However, I still think this clip is great for imagery and detail.  It also can get my students writing, hopefully about something that is important to them.  Hopefully this blog makes some sense and I am not rambling.  Just some of my thoughts that have come out of this past's week of writing. 

Meet Meat

The Charlotte Observer's headline today reads: "Rising Beef Prices Bite into Restaurant Profits." This make me consider how our food industry has so drastically changed over the past century. How in Sinclair's, The Jungle, the production of meat was just deplorable with no real standards enforced. Now I know that this was a work of fiction, but it was certainly founded in truth, and this piece revolutionized the meat industry. I do enjoy reading about the miracles of chemistry, the pickling of hams, and the ranking of meat; the joke of Packingtown was that the processing plants used everything of the pig but the squeal. But one of my favorite parts of The Jungle must be the description of the "special sausage"; mmmmmmmmmmm deeeeeeeelicious. It's a long paragraph, but it's well worth reading every tasty morsel:

It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions- a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white--it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one-- there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water--and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage--but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for this they would charge two cents more a pound.

http://www.literatureproject.com/jungle/jungle_14.htm

Now that's was I call a bargain, special sausage for only two cents more a pound!!

This reminded me of one of our contemporary meat scandals - the infamous pink slime: the food additive in (some) processed meat and ground beef that's been treated with ammonia to kill  bacteria. Jamie Oliver describes it:  Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution: Pink Slime   This caused quite a scandal with certain grocery stores and fast-food chains. As a result of this expose', many companies discontinued using this filler in their meat products. But I still can't help but wonder, what really goes on behind the scenes of the production of food and meat?  Having worked for so many years in the restaurant industry, I KNOW some of the less than desirable things that have been known to occur in a kitchen, servers' station, etc; but what about in a massive processing plant? Isn't there a minimum number of allowable insect wings permitted in peanut butter? Who was telling me about my beloved Fig Newtons - that yummy cookie that supposedly has the lowest standard for what's allowed as unexpected "extras" in the production of the cookie? What about CAFO's?  Pig lagoons?

How far have we really come? Or, do I really want to know?

Teaching Inquiry through Many Walks

Today during the Summer Institute we looked at genre theory and how we can expose our students to other genres.  At first I struggled with this concept and how I could make it work in my classroom.  I want to leave the Summer Institute with lots of ideas and concepts to take into my classroom.  I feel like after today, I have so many to choose to replicate in my classroom.

This blog post is going to be more about ideas that I have for my demo presentation and just ideas in general that I could use for my classroom.   Tonight I was trying to get inspired for my blog post and as I was running errands, I was listening to a fascinating conversation on NPR about GMO's and the various ramifications that surround them.  This would be a great way to use food inquiry. I attached the link below.
 NPR Article

As I was looking at the GMO debate, this article about 3 Kickstarter food projects popped into my news feed.  This particular one I think students would find fascinating.  Just spending thirty minutes on G+ communities gave me the start to some great ideas for incorporating food inquiry into the classroom.  This Kickstarter piece would be a great start at the genre theory assignment. 
Kickstarter Potato Salad


The English teacher in me really wants some content to use in my class and NPR again was a goldmine for me.  This book is called Fictitious Dishes and according to the site's summary, "From the watery gruel of Oliver Twist to the seductive cupcakes from The Corrections, Dinah Fried offers photographic interpretations of culinary moments from classic and contemporary literature, partnered with text from the book that inspired its creation".  This looks like a great piece to get me started on my food inquiry journey.

I leave you with this great quiz (or at least I think it is awesome).  See if you can figure out which novel the picture is describing. 
A Taste for Fiction... Literature Picture Quiz

Tomorrow is my demo, and I am eager to present. It's about our connections to food - surprise!! As I have begun to explore these connections: from global to local to personal connections, I have been researching numerous food related articles and books.

One of the issues that is really jumping out at me is how processed much of our food is, particularly here in America; however, the globalization of food is obvious as you will see from photographs in my demo on Tuesday. 

This idea of processed foods fascinates me: manufacturers are always trying to tweak food so that it is more appealing visually, lasts a looooooooong time on the shelf in the grocery store, and tastes better by appealing to our cravings for salt, sugar and fat. With science, food continues to be chemically and scientifically developed, shaped, grown, and modified in every way imaginable. To say the food our grandparents ate is not the food we eat today, is an understatement.

In past years I have used Steve Ettlinger's  Twinkie Deconstructed  in my American Studies course, Food in America. In his book, Ettlinger literally deconstructs the Twinkie by listing and analyzing every ingredient in America's beloved snack cake. He focuses on each of the 37 ingredients - many of them are chemical substitutions for real, whole foods. 

A mini-project that I created to accompany this book involves each student reading one or two chapters (each chapter highlights a particular ingredient in the Twinkie), research it further, and then present their findings to the class. It is always shocking to learn about how many non-food products are in a Twinkie; not unlike much of other processed foods we eat. As the students work their way through the 37 ingredients, everyone is shocked at this realization. 

I always look forward to end class when I offer Twinkies that I brought in to share with my students; I have had few takers over the years.