Two hundred public words, um, I took Bastille Day off? 3/30
Not really -- I got agitated and forgot, because... I showered with my phone yesterday. Gah. So dumb. I have this bad habit of sticking my phone in my bra when I don't have pockets. I hate clothes without pockets, let me just say. But I wear them. ANYWAY. So yesterday I went swimming with amarama, and I wore my suit under my clothes so I wouldn't have to change at the pool... I am so slow at all that sort of thing, sigh. And... I didn't remember that I'd put my phone where a bra would be if that suit had a bra. It doesn't, so I am not entirely clear why the phone... stayed there.
But I didn't realize it until I got OUT of the pre-swim shower. Fucking hell. I don't think it's working -- I took it apart and dried what I could and let it air for a couple hours, and then reluctantly tried turning it on. And it came on. But just like my old laptop this Spring, none of the buttons work. I haven't tested it this morning...
So much of yesterday (and much of this entry) was wasted (and is being wasted) by dealing with the results of that stupidity. I was insured, it turns out, so a replacement phone is supposed to arrive today. But I don't have a landline, so this was very annoying and trying.
So. Back to writing and reading. I refuse to give up on this meme because I forgot a day, fuck it.
My niece called me with an emergency yesterday: she needed me to bring her Anne's House of Dreams, stat. Since I was coming to dinner. This is the fifth Anne of Green Gables book... she's whizzing through them, a year earlier than I did. I don't actually remember when I read the whole series -- just when I read the first one, which was at age 10, when my dad took us to Lucy Maud Montgomery's childhood home in Prince Edward Island. It's a museum now, in Cavendish, PEI, and I love places like that, preserved bits of the material past. He bought me the first book in the museum shop and, oh, joy. I mean, even though Mark Twain blurbed them, the Anne books are not LITERATURE in the same way that Twain is, and I knew it even as a kid. But I loved them. And R. is loving them. Since I have most of them on my iPad now, for free, I gave R. all my paperbacks... (I am pretty sure that it is not the only set of the books I own, to be honest, though the other set might be in Chicago...)
I love it that she treats me like an emergency book delivery service, ha.
I think one reason the R. and I love Anne is because, especially when she's a kid, she is hyper-intelligent and loves words and reading and writing. She's a nerd, in other words, and a bookworm, and very creative. She often prefers to live in a world of her own fantasizing. Especially before she's a teenager, she flings big words around just because she likes them so much. I did that. R. does that. Words are amazing, wonderful things -- all the shadings and nuances that are available for communication using language, wow. It blows the mind, man. And R. explores them, too.
I know I am biased, but as a teacher who has had to do with reading and writing and the instruction thereof for twelve years... R. just seems like such a classic model to me of (well, of one way) to develop into a good reader.
1. she was read to from infancy, and her models obviously read, love books, and make a prominent place for them in the home.
2. she developed an ear for story and language very, very young, and was using the sorts of predictive strategies and vocabulary development strategies verbally long before she even started to read. That is, she'd listen to stories -- complicated long chapter books with archaic language, to wit, all of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum -- and try to guess what would happen next, predict it, check her predictions; she'd try to make sense of words she'd never heard before by thinking about the context, and then by explicitly asking us; she'd imagine in her head what everything looked like (which is a skill I rarely saw in my first several years of teaching... kids seemed not to know how to picture things in their head if there wasn't already a movie or tv iteration of the story)...
3. She liked stories I would tell her that were endlessly long and complicated -- I retold her (properly bowdlerized) most of Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear series, and just practiced and practiced all of those skills.
4. She was eager to learn the alphabet and to start writing along with drawing.
5. She was eager to pretend to be writing books and reading, before she could. Like making tiny books for dolls, and having me write her stories that she made up about dinosaurs under the bed, while she illustrated them.
6. She read, both things that were at her starting level, like Dr. Seuss, and then, as quickly as possible, she moved on to chapter books. Earlier than I did, I think. I clung to picture books long past when I needed to.
7. Now she can dive into a book and be lost to the world around her, and she makes sense of text very, very quickly.
8. She's been writing fiction stories since she was in first grade. Interesting ones.
9. She's journaling regularly.
She's read all the Harry Potter books, all the Percy Jackson and the Olympians' series, innumerable books on Greek mythology, and now, is wading into the seas of 19th c. YAF. I guess part of me very much still values that sea... I like expanding the canon, not substituting new works and expunging old ones.
But I didn't realize it until I got OUT of the pre-swim shower. Fucking hell. I don't think it's working -- I took it apart and dried what I could and let it air for a couple hours, and then reluctantly tried turning it on. And it came on. But just like my old laptop this Spring, none of the buttons work. I haven't tested it this morning...
So much of yesterday (and much of this entry) was wasted (and is being wasted) by dealing with the results of that stupidity. I was insured, it turns out, so a replacement phone is supposed to arrive today. But I don't have a landline, so this was very annoying and trying.
So. Back to writing and reading. I refuse to give up on this meme because I forgot a day, fuck it.
My niece called me with an emergency yesterday: she needed me to bring her Anne's House of Dreams, stat. Since I was coming to dinner. This is the fifth Anne of Green Gables book... she's whizzing through them, a year earlier than I did. I don't actually remember when I read the whole series -- just when I read the first one, which was at age 10, when my dad took us to Lucy Maud Montgomery's childhood home in Prince Edward Island. It's a museum now, in Cavendish, PEI, and I love places like that, preserved bits of the material past. He bought me the first book in the museum shop and, oh, joy. I mean, even though Mark Twain blurbed them, the Anne books are not LITERATURE in the same way that Twain is, and I knew it even as a kid. But I loved them. And R. is loving them. Since I have most of them on my iPad now, for free, I gave R. all my paperbacks... (I am pretty sure that it is not the only set of the books I own, to be honest, though the other set might be in Chicago...)
I love it that she treats me like an emergency book delivery service, ha.
I think one reason the R. and I love Anne is because, especially when she's a kid, she is hyper-intelligent and loves words and reading and writing. She's a nerd, in other words, and a bookworm, and very creative. She often prefers to live in a world of her own fantasizing. Especially before she's a teenager, she flings big words around just because she likes them so much. I did that. R. does that. Words are amazing, wonderful things -- all the shadings and nuances that are available for communication using language, wow. It blows the mind, man. And R. explores them, too.
I know I am biased, but as a teacher who has had to do with reading and writing and the instruction thereof for twelve years... R. just seems like such a classic model to me of (well, of one way) to develop into a good reader.
1. she was read to from infancy, and her models obviously read, love books, and make a prominent place for them in the home.
2. she developed an ear for story and language very, very young, and was using the sorts of predictive strategies and vocabulary development strategies verbally long before she even started to read. That is, she'd listen to stories -- complicated long chapter books with archaic language, to wit, all of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum -- and try to guess what would happen next, predict it, check her predictions; she'd try to make sense of words she'd never heard before by thinking about the context, and then by explicitly asking us; she'd imagine in her head what everything looked like (which is a skill I rarely saw in my first several years of teaching... kids seemed not to know how to picture things in their head if there wasn't already a movie or tv iteration of the story)...
3. She liked stories I would tell her that were endlessly long and complicated -- I retold her (properly bowdlerized) most of Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear series, and just practiced and practiced all of those skills.
4. She was eager to learn the alphabet and to start writing along with drawing.
5. She was eager to pretend to be writing books and reading, before she could. Like making tiny books for dolls, and having me write her stories that she made up about dinosaurs under the bed, while she illustrated them.
6. She read, both things that were at her starting level, like Dr. Seuss, and then, as quickly as possible, she moved on to chapter books. Earlier than I did, I think. I clung to picture books long past when I needed to.
7. Now she can dive into a book and be lost to the world around her, and she makes sense of text very, very quickly.
8. She's been writing fiction stories since she was in first grade. Interesting ones.
9. She's journaling regularly.
She's read all the Harry Potter books, all the Percy Jackson and the Olympians' series, innumerable books on Greek mythology, and now, is wading into the seas of 19th c. YAF. I guess part of me very much still values that sea... I like expanding the canon, not substituting new works and expunging old ones.