Language---how it comes together or doesn't in the hunks of it my students hand me at the start of the year. what I can see in between the bad spelling and invented words and run-on sentences. the stories they tell and the intensity with which they tell me about themselves: their broken bones, favorite songs, the animals they love. lists of verbs, paragraphs about weather, false starts scratched out with forbidden purple ink.
and images---how close do I have to get for things to come into focus? is there a way to show what I see or is it enough to show what's there? how much light is enough, on that flaking blue brick?

A self is made, not given. It is a creative and active process of attending a life that must  be heard, shaped, seen, said aloud into the world, finally enacted and woven into the lives of others. Then a life attended is not an act of narcissism or disregard for others; on the contrary, it is searching through the treasures and debris of ordinary existence for the clear points of intensity that do not erode, do not separate us, that are most intensely our own, yet other people's too. The best lives and stories are made up of minute particulars that somehow are also universal and of use to others as well as oneself.

--Barbara Myerhoff

Today was the second day of preplanning for me. School starts Monday. I teach eighth grade Language Arts, which is all about writing, though there's speech and listening and grammar and vocabulary in there too.   I love it. It's hard work, though. One of the things that's going on right now at my school is that we predicted we'd score two percentage points higher than we did on the state standardized test in mathematics this year, so we didn't make the state list of schools who are meeting acceptable "Annual Yearly Progress."  So there's a bit of a scramble to make sure we make the grade next year so sanctions aren't imposed.

Such language. Sanctions. This means withholding money from a school that already needs it, because it serves lots of folks who are economically challenged.  Our principal knows what's going on and isn't happy with how screwy these tests are and how badly they foul things up for those they are intended to assess. Still, we've been debating the issue of whether or not to implement the "Problem of the Day" again. Midyear last year we began this foolishness of having students come into homeroom and, before they did anything else at all, answer one math and one Language Arts question, to be discussed in those classes later. This went badly at times because of a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the problems were often poorly written and were, perversely, pretty much never aligned with what was actually written down on the curriculum map for the subject area.  I know my students knew I was on their side when it came to this issue. We talked about the problems in class, usually briefly, and not derisively either, but I never assigned students a grade for them. We were hoping that this year might be a different story when it came to the problems. My students did well on the big tests this past year but I honestly don't think these unwieldy problems had much of anything to do with it.  at any rate, I was in a meeting today where we were asked if it would be okay if these problems functioned as our warm-ups. In my class, now, a warm-up can be pretty important. Sometimes it has to do with grammar but most of the time it involves writing, and with it a writing community can take shape as students create banks of their own writing prompts to use and as they raise their hands eagerly to share what they've written. It gives us a chance to laugh, to connect, to talk about what works in writing and what doesn't, and to strengthen our writing voices. I write along with them and I love that my work mandates writing for me every day.  I have notebooks of my own warm-ups going back years and I also have old student notebooks of them that mean a lot to me. No way was I going to sacrifice all this to a discombobulated question about which sentence fits better at the end of a choppy paragraph.  And I think I made my point pretty effectively. It looks like I might be writing the Language Arts Problems of the Day, along with help from another teacher or two, and I will have to talk about them briefly in class, but I can keep doing my  own warm-ups.  Not long after the meeting where this was decided, I sat down for a little while to pull together a big notebook of visual and written writing prompts, garnered from students, websites, other teachers, friends, and my own imagination over the years. I'm not done with it yet. I got tired, but before I quit for the day and went home I decided to make an impromptu list of words and phrases from the prompts, kind of like what Dawn did in her blog recently after some time at the library. This isn't a found poem per se, this list, but maybe it will be. I'm still waiting to see how and if it comes together, what will get left out, what will change, and what will come forward with its hand raised to be heard.

A deep breath in

Stepping stones

An empty parking space

Off in the field

Muscadine vines

An evacuation procedure

Cappuccino with nutmeg sprinkled on its foamy surface

The man who wasn't there

Lake water lapping at my shoes

A blue sky, darkening

Three dogwood trees

The life of Batman

The history of root beer

Happy songs

Making your own dictionary

Strawberries

The haircuts of 2007

Lost love

Jeremy the tomcat

how to build a giant wooden horse, and why

inside your head

a bottle of curdled milk

running a marathon

the temperature of the sun

the day after tomorrow

dancing when the stars go blue

the haunted fishing boat

preclude: to make impossible, prevent, shut down

churlish

vigil: a watch, especially at night

Bonanza

Why you should wear sunblock on the beach

Were you comfortable?

The horrifying test

What the hairdresser used to think

The broken flashlight

Daydream in periwinkle

Leaning down to pick up the fragile shell

Outrageous bangle bracelets

The hike that took you into yourself

The tree of life

Organizational skills

the alien princess

An inarticulate but heartfelt plea

Red satin pajamas

The mermaid's consternation

The raincoat's pockets leaked

A familiar greeting

Big shoes

Love hesitates

A slice of watermelon crowded with seeds

Last season's handbag and what you left in the inner pocket

Twilight

forbidden music

a wooden train

why are you talking like that?

the downfall of Barbie

a wider horizon than usual

the origins of silly putty

things I only remember sometimes

dreaming with open eyes

she touched the little key in her pocket and smiled

It may be that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

--Wendell Berry