Notable Sentences...for Imitation and Creation

I preach great writing all day long, but it's great to stumble onto it when you're reading a classroom novel with students.

In Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins, for example, we read a description of a tsunami pounding the island of San Nicolas. As one wave recedes and a larger wave advances, we read this description:

Like two giants they crashed against each other. They rose high in the air, bending first one way and then the other. There was a roar as if great spears were breaking in battle and in the red light of the sun the spray that flew around them looked like blood.

Slowly the second wave forced the first one backward, rolled slowly over it, and then as the victor drags the vanquished, moved in toward the island.

The wave struck the cliff. It sent long tongues streaming around me so that I could neither see nor hear. The tongues of water licked into all the crevices, dragged at my hand and at my bare feet gripping the ledge. They rose high above me on the face of the rock, up and up, and then spent themselves against the sky and fell back, hissing past me to join the water rushing on toward the cove.

What's interesting to me is that in the first two paragraphs of this selection from Chapter 27, weather is described in terms of giant warriors locked in combat. How many of us have read war novels where the armies and the conflicts were described in terms of fierce storms? Why are these two phenomena so often metaphorically linked?

In addition to the metaphors, of course, we also have the somewhat serpentine alliteration and onomatopoeia of the third paragraph, suggesting that the wave itself has morphed into a new entity, more fitting for the hunt for prey. Wouldn't you love to have descriptions like that right at your fingertips? I know I've got a bunch of examples highlighted and underlined in different texts, but I like to present students with some new exemplars as well. That action alone often prompts my students to ask to read the book from which the figurative language was selected.

Enter the Great Sentences blog. Created in truly old-school blog style, this wonderful site features a collaborative effort to collect and categorize great sentence examples from real literature. Subtitled "Notable Sentences... for Imitation and Creation," this site allows visitors to post their submissions to the site as comments. The Metaphor link, for example, has 77 comments (including the one I just added!).

According to creator Lauren Wolter:

This blog is a resource for teachers who wish to view grammar as something to be explored and not just corrected. Sometimes even teachers who want to set aside tired, old daily language practices have trouble doing so due to the seeming abundance of those deplorable, error-filled sentences and the apparent lack of stimulating, "explore-able" model sentences. As you read adult, young adult, and children's books, please share the noteworthy sentences you find, so that we may build a useful resource together.

How to use this site?

• To find great examples for yourself, not only of figurative language, but even parts of speech used beautifully in literature.
• To allow your students a web-interaction experience, as they post their own discoveries in language.
• To turn your students on to new books. Several examples, I noticed, are from Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, one of my daughter's favorite books. Another student may not know that book, but would be led to read it because of the beautiful sentences posted here.

Check the site out, and add to the wealth!

Book Drum: Going Beyond the Page

Book Drum is "the perfect companion to the books we love, bringing them to life with immersive pictures, videos, maps and music." In other words, Book Drum provides multimedia annotations to many the novels you know and love, and some you may not know and love (yet).

Each book's Profile consists of:

• Bookmarks: page-by-page commentary and illustration of the text;
• Setting: description and illustration of the main places or themes of the book;
• Glossary: foreign, invented and tricky words deciphered;
• Summary: objective synopsis of the book;
• Review: subjective analysis and evaluation of the book; and
• Author: biographical information, interview videos, links and photos.

At the site you'll find classics including David Copperfield, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Frankenstein, Don Quixote, The Handmaid's Tale, The Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, The Road, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and many more. You'll also find picture books and a few favorites from children's literature. The best part about this site? It's always growing.

What readers may find most interesting is the Bookmarks. They often confirm a conclusion a reader has already drawn, as in these examples from The Road:

At other times, the Bookmarks provide additional information which, though tangential to the storyline, in nonetheless interesting, as in the case of the game of Buzkashi, mentioned in The Kite Runner:

The obvious use of this site is a resource for teachers and students to access background knowledge for a book they're presently studying.

However, I can also see students creating their own Book Drum projects informally, using Google Docs or a similar collaborative tool. Google Docs or a wiki would allow pairs or groups of students to work on the same novel by assigning each member a set number of pages or chapters. An alternative to a full would be to use the same process with shorter literature selections: short stories, interviews, current event articles, poems, lyrics.

I have to admit, I like this site. I found myself not only checking out notes on books I had read, but also investigating books I hadn't even heard of. While some of the formatting at times seems a bit clunky (because of oddly sized graphics versus the text boxes), the research and notes seem pretty solid.

Have a thought on using this resource? Can you think of another way for students to create a similar product in order to dissect what they're reading? Leave a comment below.

Why Students Can't Read Novels

No typo on that title. It's not "Why Students Don't Read Novels," it's "Why Students Can't Read Novels."

The answer? Large blocks of uninterrupted text.

In a web article from the olden days of 1997, Jakob Nielsen answers the question of How Do People Read on the Web? by responding:

They don't.

People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. (Update: a newer study found that users read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites.)

Likewise, many magazines have given up on paragraphs, choosing line breaks over indentation, and relying more upon bulleted lists, Top Ten lists, and text boxes to deliver content to readers.

In an amusing yet painfully truthful article titled Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Text, the Onion pokes fun at this phenomenon:

WASHINGTON—Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

"Why won't it just tell me what it's about?" said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. "There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I've looked everywhere—there's nothing here but words."

While we can't rewrite the classics (although we do, I suppose), we might consider what effects these prevailing habits are having upon our students and their comprehension levels. We might also ask ourselves, What can we as teachers do to respond to this challenge?

I'm totally open to suggestions.

(image from The Onion)

Banned Books Beg to Be Read!

September 25−October 2, 2010 is Banned Books Week. No, my calendar isn't broken, but I figure, what wait?

In my opinion, there's no time like the present to thumb your nose at someone else's supposed authority over your intellectual freedoms. Check out Amazon's helpful compilation of banned books. You'll be surprised what's there! It's actually a pretty decent list of must-reads.

Pretty amazing how easily some people can be led to self-righteous, passionate outrage over literary expression. I guess they don't get out much.

Metaphorically Speaking

Stenhouse has put out a new book that I can't recommend enthusiastically enough. Rick Wormeli's Metaphors and Analogies: Power Tools for Teaching Any Subject adds to the canon of distinguished titles which deal with the topic of metaphor.

His work, however, is so far the most practical title I've seen on the topic, offering teachers simple steps for improving their instruction through the use of metaphors and analogies. Every page provides subject-specific examples, allowing readers to easily understand the real-life applications to the classroom.

My own forays into this topic began with George Lakoff's now-classic Metaphors We Live By, which plainly illustrated the pervasiveness of metaphor in everyday language.

While critics argued that the book was not well supported with research, just a brief look into its pages will convince any reader that what Lakoff was attempting to prove through discourse alone was pretty self-evident (once exposed) and pretty remarkable as well. People do speak unconsciously in metaphors, all the time, and the metaphors they choose can tell us a lot about their preconceptions, perspectives, and prejudices on a topic. My personal copy of Metaphors We Live By contains hardly a page not scribbled with a comment or question; it did profoundly influence the way in which I approached reading and language arts instruction.

Next came Marcel Danesi's Poetic Logic: The Role of Metaphor in Thought, Language, and Culture, which was arguably more research based than Metaphors We Live By. Discovering the scientific and linguistic basis for everything Lakoff argued reinforced for me that metaphorical language is neither coincidental nor arbitrary. In Danesi's own words:

The main goal of this book has been to take the reader on an excursion through an amalgam of facts, ideas, and illustrations that reveal how poetic logic works in making the world visible and thus understandable in human terms. Metaphor is a trace to poetic thinking, which constantly creates connections among things. This is why metaphors and metaforms have such emotional power—they tie people together, allowing them to express a common sense of purpose in an interconnected fashion.

What Rick Wormeli now brilliantly accomplishes through Metaphors and Analogies: Power Tools for Teaching Any Subject might be seen as a currency exchange. He takes the "hundred dollar ideas" of Lakoff and Danesi and turns them into "spending money" for the classroom. Wormeli shows how students can use metaphors to make connections between the concrete and the abstract, prior knowledge and new concepts, and language and image (neither Lakoff nor Danesi discussed visual metaphors at any length). Wormeli also goes beyond the passive museum experience of "let's notice and appreciate the beauty of metaphors" to a workshop mentality of "let's throw some clay on the wheel and see what we can form on our own." Ultimately, his work is an impressive how-to on the subject.

But what's in it for teachers of literature? So many of Wormeli's examples are based in math, social studies, and science that Reading and Language Arts teachers might wonder what's in it for them.

Rather than construct an argument, let me instead offer a simple example. Below is an excerpt from Wendelin Van Draanen's Flipped (grade level equivalent 5.5). How many single and extended metaphors can you spot? And more importantly, what additional (between the lines) information can they provide if the reader is alert enough to notice them?

My sister, on the other hand, tried to sabotage me any chance she got. Lynetta’s like that. She’s four years older than me, and buddy, I’ve learned from watching her how not to run your life. She’s got ANTAGONIZE written all over her. Just look at her – not cross-eyed or with your tongue sticking out or anything – just look at her and you’ve started an argument.

I used to knock-down-drag-out with her, but it’s just not worth it. Girls don’t fight fair. They pull your hair and gouge you and pinch you; then they run off gasping to mommy when you try and defend yourself with a fist. Then you get locked into time-out, and for what? No, my friend, the secret is, don’t snap at the bait. Let it dangle. Swim around it. Laugh it off. After a while they’ll give up and try to lure someone else.

At least that’s the way it is with Lynetta. And the bonus of having her as a pain-in-the-rear sister was figuring out that this method works on everyone. Teachers, jerks at school, even Mom and Dad. Seriously. There’s no winning arguments with your parents, so why get all pumped up over them? It is way better to dive down and get out of the way than it is to get clobbered by some parental tidal wave.

The funny thing is, Lynetta’s still clueless when it comes to dealing with Mom and Dad. She goes straight into thrash mode and is too busy drowning in the argument to take a deep breath and dive for calmer water.

And she thinks I’m stupid.

The fact is, for students to read with comprehension and appreciation, they must be able to recognize and dissect both simple and complex analogies. And for students to be able to explain their own understandings of difficult concepts (no matter what the discipline), they must be able to describe those concepts through metaphors and analogies.

I highly recommend Metaphors and Analogies: Power Tools for Teaching Any Subject for teachers looking to advance their own practice as teaching professionals. As always, Stenhouse offers you a preview of the entire book at their site.

When Will We Ever Use This Stuff?

"When will we ever use this stuff?" is an oft heard refrain in middle and high school classrooms, and I'll admit I often asked that question myself (most often in Math and Science). According to Carol Jago, it's a valid question, especially when students are asked to write responses to literature. After all, apart from college professors, who does that in real life?

In her NCTE white paper titled "Crash! The Currency Crisis in American Culture" Carol provides some answers. Jago has taught middle and high school for 32 years in Santa Monica, California, and directs the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA. She is president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English and has written four books in the NCTE High School Literature series.

After you check out her white paper, be sure to weigh in at the NCTE ning. The follow-up comments make for interesting reading as well!