Category Archives: Journal

Blogging the evolving thesis

For our November unit “Technology and _____ ,” we will be attempting to answer questions about technology that pertain to our interests outside of technology. The goal is that, by the end of the unit, we will have discovered an answer (or a thesis) to the questions we are asking. Along the way, we will be attempting to answer these questions via blogging. By the end of the unit, you will have made six blog posts on your tech blog. We will also be commenting on one another’s blogs.

Our unit’s culminating assignment is a celebration blog post that reflects on the blogging experience and how it changed your thinking about your topic and about writing and publishing.

How this unit relates to our last unit: you’ll apply your knowledge of the six aspects of rhetorical situation to the design and posts in your tech blog.

How this unit relates to our next unit: in our fourth unit (“Research Essay”), you’ll use your journey into your topic as initial research for the next unit’s research paper. You’ll also use your journey as an outline for an evolving thesis in that paper.

Our month’s objective: by the last class of the month, each student will

  • have a blog whose design and entries demonstrate a spirit of exploration concerning his tech topic
  • have a thesis statement that has evolved at least twice based on research, reading, and other students’ feedback
  • have completed introductory research regarding her tech topic: her own mind, popular writing, and some academic writing

Artwork: “technology” by Backdoor Survival. Used by permission.

Circle time

My wife’s students, ages six to twelve, sit in a circle the first day of class. There is a yarn ball in the middle. Each child shares, holds onto the strand of yarn, and throws what remains of the yarn ball to the next raised hand. A web with twenty-six points, twenty-six strands, forms.

I get an email today from a friend concerned about an extreme statement his friend makes on social media. Should I talk to him about it? he asks. I don’t know, I think. Do you know him outside of social media circles?

Then each child helps wind the yarn back into a ball, sharing something deeper this time, retracing the yarn to the person before her. Doing so, she steps gently across the receding web, which represents the community that will ebb and flow and support life in that room all year.

If my friend’s friend were my friend, I think, I might ask him for some context or explanation. Community itself is context: it’s the whites of your eyes, the bad day I know you’re having, the book we’re reading together, the reaction you have to your brother, whom I also know.

There’s this scene in To Kill a Mockingbird: Jem and Scout find Atticus at the county jail one night defending Tom from a lynch mob. To Scout, the men are only “shadows” and “solid shapes,” hidden in the summer heat under drawn-down hats. Then she breaks into “the circle of light” around Atticus and recognizes one of the men.

“Don’t you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I’m Jean Louise Finch. You brought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?”

Mr. Cunningham tries to retain his anonymity in the face of Scout’s friendly onslaught, but he eventually gives in, telling Scout that, yes, he would certainly tell his son Walter that Scout said hey. Then Mr. Cunningham and the whole mob melt into the night.

Each morning this way, the ball of yarn exhales and inhales in the children’s hands, then it rests near the heart of the classroom, waiting again for the next day’s circle time. At the end of the year, the students snip pieces from it to tie their hair, mark their books, and decorate their sneakers.

[Photo by suziesparkle. Used by permission through a Creative Commons license. I cropped and brightened it.]

Assistance

I’m the only one who tells it: the sun is practically sideways, and a couple, having eaten supper, walks by our house. The man looks up at our second-story window and says, “What a cute little girl.”

Ford, a toddler three and a half years younger than I, has toddled to the window. The sun shines on all of his yellow curls.

I’m in the front yard. “That’s not a girl,” I tell the couple. “That’s Ford the boy.”

Not from a photograph, not a tale told by a parent: I remember it myself.

I like those unassisted memories best. I don’t have many of them. Most of my childhood, like most of most everyone else’s childhood, is mist. Puberty’s mental and physiological changes make it “impossible to ‘remember’ the consciousness of childhood,” Benedict Anderson points out in his book Imagined Communities, which I just finished.

How can a high school senior write about herself with authority? Eighteen years of life is a long time, but the first twelve years of it are largely locked behind childhood’s door. What does it mean, and what is it like, to write a college essay?

Sometimes I think I remember, in one of my mom’s albums, a shot of Ford as a little kid at a window. I’m not looking for it.

[Photo by Peter Miller. Used by permission under a Creative Commons license.]