Prompts that Inspire More than Require

          I believe that teachers enrich lives by offering students choices, not immutable guidelines, and by celebrating innovative approaches, not hunting for mistakes. 

          When I offer writing prompts--usually multiple options based on a single topic--I relish the student who says, "Can I do the second one, but change it so that…?" The students who see their own alternative within the alternatives provided are showing me that they are taking a vested interest in the assignment. Sometimes, I like their prompts better than the options I've offered!  For example, one student took a prompt about exploring a moment in which a character realizes that his win is simultaneously his competitor's loss and she turned it into personal narrative about a tennis match that she won, but felt almost guilty for winning. After she read her story aloud, and listened to feedback from me and her two classmates, she suddenly raised her eyebrows. "Wait, now that I think about it, I didn't really feel GUILTY about winning," she commented. "I mean, I LIKE winning, and someone has to win, right? Actually, I felt SORRY for my opponent because she was crying after she lost, and then her mom lost her temper and actually said 'shut up' when the little brother asked out loud why she was crying. I couldn't believe her mom did that. And the whole thing was really…embarrassing." As I began suggesting ways that the student could show those feelings of shock and embarrassment via mood-setting actions and more descriptive details, she quickly nodded, picked up her pen, and declared preemptively, "Okay, I think I know how to change it." The final draft of her story ended up sparking a discussion about good sportsmanship, parenting, and showing mood in writing with vivid verbs and descriptive details. All in all, her alternative approach to the prompt turned a writing lesson into an introspective exercise for all of us.

          Students grow as learners by considering various approaches to developing their understanding of a topic, and by exploring the approach that most challenges their creativity and interest. They learn more from asking questions than from reciting answers, and retain more from listening and discussing than from writing rote responses or taking notes from a lecture to memorize for a test. The most memorable learning is, at least in part, self-directed, I have found. 

          If you're still pondering that last statement, think about some of the most enriching school work you've done--the assignments you remember best. Did you follow steps exactly or make that assignment unique to you in some way? And did you surprise yourself with your own creative flow?

Modernizing Myths for Writing Practice

The Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea is one of my favorite myths to have students modernize and continue. In the story, Pygmalion, a king and a sculptor, can find no woman he loves as much as the beautiful statue he carved and named "Galatea." He prays to the goddess of love, Aphrodite, for a miracle: the animation of his statue into a real woman to love. His love, of course, is based entirely on external beauty, a point not lost on even my youngest students when I ask, "Can he really be in love with a statue?" to which some have replied, "Not really. He doesn't even know if she's a good person, only that she LOOKS good." At that point, I ask what might have happened after the story, the part not mentioned in the "they lived happily ever after" conclusion. And students from age nine to fifteen have written a variety of fascinating creative endings to show his disillusionment upon discovering that his "love" is either 1) mean and cold inside; 2) dumb as the stone from which she was carved; 3) jealous of his other sculptures and anyone else he might look at with admiration; 4) bent on destroying him and all other men who worship beauty without knowing a person's inner self; 5) stuck in infancy because she never matured normally, just came to life as an adult; or 5) completely uninterested in him.

Nine-year-old A.C. wrote the following new ending that I've decided to feature here. I hope you find it as charming and impressive as I do. I asked her to include a simile that fit thematically into the story, and to include description, action, and dialogue (as I always request). I also asked that she write in the myth-telling style of the original story, which I'd read with her.

What Happened to Galatea After Coming to Life?

by A.C., age 9 (UNEDITED)

          They had been living happily together for the last hour, when he noticed her smile fade away and a face of evilness appeared.

          

          "I have come in my true form," she said in a musical voice, "and now you shall be king no longer!" She cackled, rubbing her hands together simultaneously. Pygmalion stepped back with fright. Now in his eyes her beauty faded away and she was nothing but an ugly old witch. He ran as fast as a horse pulling a chariot in order to escape. Then he stopped at a dead end. He closed his eyes and prayed to Goddess Aphrodite, wishing Galatea would return to her stone form.

          Immediately, a light came from Galatea's eyes and then there was silence and everything went still. There, standing in front of him was a stone figure of Galatea. He rushed to the temple and thanked Aphrodite (afro-die-tee) for showing him that outer beauty doesn't matter. The next day he met a woman who had ragged clothes and seemed too thin, but as she spoke, she showed she was worth loving and she had inner beauty. After years of true love, they got married and had a beautiful daughter named Galatea.

If You're Blessed Enough To Move, You're Blessed Enough To Move Others

Writer's block does not exist as long as our bodies, eyes, and minds have the energy to move, to observe, and to ponder. Discovering the world is how we help others to discover what we see, what we imagine, and how we feel. We can then share our discoveries by building them from word pictures into mental movies. But first we must move in order to move others. Look at what I found while taking a walk in an old LA neighborhood--a writing prompt hiding in a rectangle of the world that I was blessed enough to capture with my camera:

Rather than sharing my answer to the "what if" questions prompted by this picture, I am asking you--readers of any age--to describe what you see/imagine in this rectangle of the world, and what would happen next if this picture had a Play button.

Will you write a poem, or a story? Will it be a fantasy, a horror story, a sci-fi tale? What do you see: a magical, arboreal eruption; a giant's foot or a monster's hoof; an extraterrestrial invader or protector? Who will see this image, and how will he/she/they react? What if you awoke to see this outside your window, from the house across the street?

If you share with me and my readers your opening lines or paragraphs in the comments section below, I promise to share my positive feedback. You're blessed enough to read, so you're blessed enough to have your words read by others!

YouTube for Enrichment--yes!

DO NOT PLAY THE VIDEO BELOW YET. FIRST READ THIS:

I opened YouTube to this video and, before playing it, asked some of my Chinese students to look at the cover shot--the close up of the young man with sunglasses and a large instrument, only halfway visible--and guess what and whom they were about to watch. Most agreed that he was probably a rapper musician about to chant a song, and maybe play upright bass at the same time.

"Okay. Why do you say that?" I asked.

Shyly, one replied, "Well, he's wearing sunglasses, and not to sound racist or anything, but usually black guys with sunglasses on YouTube are, like, rappers, you know…."

"Or a comedian. Maybe he's going to do a parody song."

Keeping a blank face, I continued questioning: "Really? And what do you guess that his voice might sound like?"

Another student answered, "Kind of like a Southern accent, like African-Americans in cities talk."

"Mmhmm. So, keep in mind what you predicted and watch with me now." I clicked the Play arrow.

[READER, NOW CLICK ON THE ARROW, TOO, AND WATCH THE VIDEO, IMAGINING YOURSELF AS A CHINESE MIDDLE SCHOOLER, WATCHING THIS WITH ME.]





"WHAAAAT?!" they all exclaimed.

"How does he speak Chinese better than I do?" Giggles and uncomfortable looks were exchanged between the girls and boys.

"Wow, is he that guy from Pentatonix, Mrs. Lipson? The beat boxer? I didn't know he could play cello, too!"

I nodded, smiling.

"Gosh, I didn't even know you could play cello like that--so cool!"

"I didn't expect him to start beat-boxing while he was playing!"

I interjected, "You expected a lot of things, but not what he did, right?" They all nodded.

"Yeah, especially the Chinese! How did he learn Chinese? I mean, he's African-American!"

"He's obviously very smart," replied a 13-year-old boy. "He said in Chinese that he goes to Yale."

"Is this for real? Like, did he learn a script or something? Is this a scam?"

Another student answers the question, shaking his head. "No, he was speaking Chinese perfectly." Turning to me, he added, "Mrs. Lipson, his vocabulary was not even basic, like you'd expect. He uses really advanced words. Wow…"

"Yes, he's a remarkably talented young man. He happens to be a friend of my daughter, too, by the way." Jaws dropped, but before more enthusiastic commotion could start, I declared, "Okay, everyone, listen up. Here's your prompt: Write about how this video defies expectations and illustrate each of the stereotypes that this brilliant, talented, young man, Kevin Olusola, has challenged via his YouTube performance. And I want you to reflect upon what your expectations show you about yourself and your perceptions of others, as well as how you defy expectations of Chinese people."

The short essays that resulted from this prompt, overall, discussed how Kevin Olusola singlehandedly dispelled five stereotypes and enlightened these viewers with his YouTube video. Their main points included how this video taught them: 1) That a dark-skinned man in sunglasses is not a rapper, a comedian, or a "thug," and may be an Ivy-league college student; 2) That a black man might play cello, an instrument usually associated with classical music, not pop or rap; 3) That a cello can play music other than classical style; 4) That beat-boxing can pair with cello for an awesome, one-man band; and 5) That an African-American can speak better Chinese than a Chinese-American--and that they needed to study Chinese more! The students' reflections regarding themselves included their realizations that they needed to keep biases out of their expectations regarding black people and people of other races, in general. And their realizations regarding how stereotypes of Chinese people affect who they are and how they act made for a lively discussion about academic pressures based on expectations that they must be smart and great test-takers and get perfect scores in math, etc.

Thank you, Kevin Olusola, for unwittingly providing such an enlightening writing prompt! Look up Kevin Olusola on YouTube, and find him as one of the five brilliant a cappella singers of Pentatonix.

Making Humorous Use of the Carpe Diem Theme

       
Having discussed the theme of carpe diem ("seize the day") in literature with my middle school and high school students, they recognized this concept immediately in this poem I found posted on Facebook, "Dust If You Must," by Rose Milligan. The full poem appears  below.

          So after reading and discussing the poem--and giggling with morbid enthusiasm over the final stanza, which some didn't fully understand at first--I asked them to use the poem as the basis for a story with the "seize the day" theme. (In case you can't read the last stanza clearly, it reads: "Dust if you must,  but bear in mind,/ Old age will come and it's not kind,/ And when you go--and go you must,/ You, yourself, will make more dust.") I created teams to collaborate and suggested that they write about an obsessively clean or orderly person who learns what really matters in life from another person, who quotes this poem to her/him. To my surprise, a couple of them nodded, saying, "Oh, you mean an OCD person, right?" Either these preteens are psychologists-in-training or authors-in-the-making. I vote for the latter, especially after reading this story that evolved from a collaboration by K.E. and S.V., two middle-school girls.

     "Wanna go to the movie, Anna?" Roxy asked, though she already knew the answer.

     "What? Oh, no. I'm starting on the social studies project," Anna answered, barely looking up from the piles of papers put in neat stacks on her desk.

     "Um…you mean the one that's going to be assigned in a week?" Roxy raised her eyebrow.

     "I know, I know. I should have started it LAST week," Anna muttered, ashamed.

     "We didn't even know it existed until today!" Roxy grumbled. "Cut loose would you? Carpe diem!"

     Anna sighed, not wanting to step on Roxy's leather-booted toes. Anna had adjusted to Roxy's obnoxious, oh-god-let's-do-this attitude, but it still interfered with her "snobby, perfectionist life." As Anna contemplated the similarities between Japan and China, Roxy rolled her eyes. "Come on, Anna! You don't have to start right now!"

     "Yes I do! Do you know how embarrassing it would be if I got a 100%?" Anna shuddered, just thinking about it. Roxy sighed. She had heard enough about Anna's "above hundred percentage." 

     "Fine, Anna. Call me when you decide to stop throwing away your life. I have one word for you. YOLO!" Roxy muttered. As she was walking away, Anna stopped her. 

     "Stop! You're about to step on the place I'm about to put my backpack on. You don't want me having a dirty backpack?"

     "Oh my god, you're so pretentious!" Roxy stormed out. Anna didn't know where she was going, though, since class was just about to start.

     Roxy saw the teacher walk in and she stormed back towards Anna and sat down next to her. Roxy slumped down in her seat.

     A few moments later while the teacher was giving a lesson about geometric shapes, a note landed on Anna's desk from the direction of Roxy.

     "Dust if you must, but bear in mind,

      Old age will come and it's not kind. --Rose Milligan"

     "What's that supposed to mean? I'm not even dusting right now! Dusting's from 2:00 to 3:00. She should know this! And I'm not that old! I'm only 13. Hmph. I'm not wasting my life. Just because I never do extracurricular activities, or have fun, or…"

The End

PLEASE LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS FOR THE TWO YOUNG AUTHORS (OR ME) IN THE SECTION BELOW. AND FEEL FREE TO SHARE THIS POST! THANKS.

Revealing a Character's Depth Through an Intentionally Phony Tone: Kirsten Smith's Poetry as a Prompt

          People don't always mean what they say--or how they say it. Sometimes, to understand each other, we have to interpret the meaning behind the other's words, to understand that one's tone may not reflect the true feelings behind the words. How often do we hear people say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it that way!" And how often do we forgive those people, understanding that their intentions were good, even if their tone seemed harsh? We may even soften toward someone whom we know is trying to sound tougher or colder than he feels, because we know enough about that person to detect and sympathize with his need to cover up painful emotions.

          In writing fiction and poetry, we can manipulate tone to direct how our readers feel and respond to our characters. Sometimes, we might imbue a character's voice with a tone that intentionally belies his/her words so that readers can relish figuring out some truth about the character, without our merely telling them. This technique engages readers more fully and enables them to experience those "aha" moments when they notice clues that subtly reveal depth of character via description, action, and dialogue ("D.A.D."--my mnemonic device for painting vivid word pictures).

          Kirsten Smith, author of the poignant YA novel-in-verse The Geography of Girlhood, illustrates this technique of using tone to belie sentiments and simultaneously reveal character in the poem, "For the Ice-Skater He Loves." Writing in first person, as a girl whose younger stepbrother has revealed his first love to her, she says, "It's not like I care about him,/ in fact, he drives me crazy/ with his stories about you…." She then berates him in the poem--"He's not much to look at"--while sneaking in some of his endearing qualities in a curmudgeonly way: "but he's got shiny hair and/ sometimes he smells like cinnamon,/ and yesterday, he…bought me a pair of really ugly earrings/ that are kind of cute." The poem concludes with a tough-girl tone, threatening that "if you hurt him," she will fill the girl's locker with hate notes, snag her tutu, tamper with her blades, or poison her cocoa. The poet has masterfully manipulated the narrator's tone in a way that reveals it as the girl's cover for her fondness toward this stepbrother, a fondness which she seems to have realized in the midst of her critique of the girl of his dreams. As a reader, I found this revelation of her character endearing.

          I presented Smith's poem to a ninth-grade boy student, and then posed it as a prompt for his own poem to illustrate a tone that belies loosely hidden feelings, subtly revealed. Here is what B.C. came up with, and I found his emulation and understanding spot on! By the way, he does not have a brother, and is an only child, which makes this even more touching.
       

My Useless Brother
By B. C. (9th grade)

So you’re the bully.
The one who’s been
terrorizing my stupid little brother.

I mean, I get why you would.
He’s cocky, annoying and useless,
bad at sports,
and even laughs at his own jokes

I mean, he’s also nice,
cares about people,
and can make a killer sandwich.

But if you hurt him anymore,
I’ll rip your precious football jersey,
I’ll break your football catching hands,
I’ll make you give yourself a wedgie.

These aren’t just threats.
They’re promises.


IF YOU ENJOYED B.C.'s poem, please leave a comment! 

Sharing Words from Teacher Heaven

I am in Teacher Heaven after reading an absolutely brilliant literary response to this quotation from H.G. Wells: "Advertising is legalized lying." This young author has been fascinated by our previous lessons on the subtleties of word-spinning, as seen in ads for products and political campaigns. He has synthesized much of our discussions in this lively, wry essay on advertising. And his essay structure outshines many high school, even college-age, writers. The only editing I did--I swear!--is to alter some misspelled words and delete one superfluous phrase. The vocabulary and information about obscure plants, etc., are all his! I provided nothing, in terms of the information he shared, except for the initial prompt by H. G. Wells.

Legal Lying

 by D.S., age 10 

H.G Wells once declared that advertising was simply legalized lying. In many cases, his statement is completely true, but to understand why, we will have to take a journey back in time to around 4000 BC, the time of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. In the large cities of these ancient civilizations, merchants crowded together in marketplaces and inevitably competition arose. This competition sparked the roots of modern ads. In an environment where people had their choice of where to shop, instead of depending on one sole shopkeeper, the merchants had to squabble over the stream of revenue that came into the marketplace. As the marketplace rapidly expanded, the merchants would have to convince shoppers to buy at their stall. Soon, shrewd shopkeepers found out how to present their product in the most favorable way possible, namely by omitting some important information. In this way, "Discounted Week-Old Cabbage" was discarded in favor of "Cheap Value Cabbage." Advertising, and its association with lying, was born. Meanwhile, in archaic England, the first advertising had taken a slightly different path. Shops began to hang wooden signs outside of buildings to publicize their establishments and to clarify what they did. For example, a wooden board with a drink on it would be a pub, or a hammer and nails would mean Carpenter, and so on, and so forth. The great-granddaddy of the classifieds in the newspapers of today were born.

Let us fast-forward now to the 16th century. The first paid ads are beginning to pop up in the newspapers of the time. The most shrewd of the advertisers have realized that the public believes that the newspapers are to be trusted and that many people read them, so, taking advantage of the lust for money that many people possess, they paid advertisers money in order to let their ads reach a wider audience. This was also when people began to realize that the products in ads weren’t exactly what they claimed to be. By the time Mark Twain rolled around, "quack" medicines featured in "quack" magazines and paid testimonials had already begun to crop up around the Western world. Admakers and entrepreneurs were really little more than scammers who took advantage of the public`s gullibility to sell products with grand names like Revalenta Arabica, which took advantage of the obscurity of the name in order to attract customers into thinking that it was some new scientific wonder, which was, in fact, simply dried lentil flour with the nutritional value of ground split peas. In the face of this, people like H.G Wells slowly began to realize the true nature of advertising.

Let us now move to the early 20th century. In the face of increasing public pressure, lawmakers began to take steps towards limiting and restricting advertising. Before the turn of the century, advertisers were required to state any harmful information or anything negative associated with the product. But once again, admakers found a way around the restrictions. At the turn of the century, we arrive at our predicament today.

Many of you, I am certain, have seen the fine grey print that seems to haunt the bottom of every ad site, or heard the speed-talk at the end of commercials. This is what has become of the efforts to stem the onset of false advertising. The truth is hidden away nearly out of sight to the common consumer. What is happening today is like governing mining with laws written when there was still a man shaking a pan over a stream--if you are an adult not in prison, you can stake a claim. Companies can comply with the law by hiding the information NEARLY out of sight, and still do perfectly legal actions. So, at the end of this long journey, H.G Wells turned out to be right. But all we can do for now is keep our eyes open and ears sharp for the legal lying all around us.