Second day...

Whew!  Today seemed to fly by...Rebecca gave a wonderful demo on motivation and created a lesson using so many resources that were threaded together by a pair theme.  I found it so much fun to try to think of pairs that did not 'go' together.  This exercise got me thinking about the importance of binaries and how they can help to define/create.    

Revision...reviewing...renewing...re-seeing...Sally's exercise helped me to think about the myriad ways I could motivate my students to view this practice.  I really love Dorry's idea of creating a portfolio of revisions from a single text...this is something I may use in my classroom this year!

Tech lunch was helpful-especially at the end of the day...thanks so much Lacy.

Lil's inquiry on Responding has me thinking about the importance of a writing community.  The word community evokes so many things - social threads that weave and bind us together.  If we respond to the writer and not the writing (product), then shouldn't we be working to create relationships?   Respond to the writer and not to the writing... Perhaps our students are asking us to redirect our attention to them and not their product?

In her essay "Between the Drafts", Nancy Sommers aspires to the "teaching a language out of the context of life."  She dialogues the importance of authorship and of how stories and experiences are unique to each student.  Sommers writes: "But, of course, our students are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with authorial intent.  Given the opportunity to speak their own authority as writers, given a turn in the conversation, students can claim their stories as primary source material and transform their experiences into evidence."  Respond to the writer and not to the writing...

I cannot wait to see what tomorrow holds!