The Doodle Revolution

The Doodle Revolution
by Sunni Brown (her "Doodlers, unite!" TED talk is here)
Penguin, 2014
review copy from the public library

You could probably read/skim this book at five different times in your life and get five different personal life lessons from it. My big take-away this time around is that doodling is not bad. Doodling is a way to think and learn:

I want to teach my students some doodling tools so that we can doodlearn (yes, I just made that word up!) together.

But what this book gave me for right now (for today and this week and the rest of the summer) was a reminder that I don't have to wait until I'm an amazing artist to have fun with doodling. I learned to doodle new, more expressive stick figures, and use eye positions, noses, mouths and eyebrows to create a variety of more emotive faces:

And I returned to my TED challenge and illustrated notetaking by opening the TED app on my phone, scanning the featured talks, finding one with NOTICE in the title (my One Little Word for 2015) and received this excellent message from the universe:

Tony Fadell: "The first secret of design is...noticing"

Poetry Friday -- Found Poem

In a recent Brain Pickings article about Mark Strand, this quote stood up in front of me, shot its sleeves, straightened its tie, and announced, "I'm here. I understand that your OLW for 2015 is notice? Well, I've arrived to wallop your brain with a new take on attentiveness."


We’re only here 
for a short while. 
And I think it’s such a lucky accident, 
having been born, 
that we’re almost obliged to pay attention. 

In some ways, 
this is getting far afield. 
I mean, we are – 
as far as we know – 
the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious. 
We could even 
be the universe’s 
form of consciousness. 

We might have come along 
so that the universe could 
look at itself. 

I don’t know that, 
but we’re made of the same stuff that stars are made of, 
or that floats around in space. 

But we’re combined in such a way 
that we can describe 
what it’s like to be alive, 
to be witnesses. 
Most of our experience is that of being a witness. 
We see and hear and smell other things. 

I think being alive is responding.

--Mark Strand, quoted in CREATIVITY: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DISCOVERY AND INVENTION
(line breaks are mine)


Wow. Just...wow, right?

When you click over to the article, there is a for-real Mark Strand poem at the end, and as you read or scroll through to get to it, don't you admire how Maria Popova uses art from children's books to illustrate her post?

Liz has the Poetry Friday roundup today at Elizabeth Steinglass. I hope to be able to make the rounds this week. Life has expanded my one square inch to give me a smidge more breathing room than last week!

Slice of Life: Why (Land Lab Edition)

Thanks to Stacy and the team at Two Writing Teachers for hosting
Slice of Life every week!

Why I stopped pulling weeds.

Can you see her there, hanging upside down?

Why I stopped cutting back dead stuff.

On the yucca stalk.

Why I turned off my music.

The grandfather was singing to his granddaughter.
We just happened to leave the playground/landlab at the same time.
 I complimented his singing and asked him what language it was.
Macedonian.
MACEDONIAN!

Why I stopped cutting back the grasses.

Whose pathways? Whose home?

What I did when I slowed down.

Our strawberry plant just might make it!

What else I saw when I slowed down.

Noticing

My favorite classroom phrase these days is, "What do you notice?"

For awhile, I was zooming right ahead to, "What are you wondering?" But I realized that before you can wonder, you usually have to notice.

This is a graph that Environmental Club students studied after a dusting of snow:

from SnowCrystals.com

What do you notice?
Do you have to understand before you notice, or can your noticing lead to understanding?



More and more, our content learning begins with one or more images that are rich for noticing. These images and noticings build background knowledge and vocabulary for the entire spectrum of my diverse class of learners.

Ohio’s Native People in the 1600-1700s

from One State, Many Nations

What do you notice? 

As you notice, can you compare and contrast?

White Settlement Patterns in the Ohio River Valley During the 18th Century

from One State, Many Nations

What do you notice?

As you notice, can you infer any causes or effects? 

Why are so many of the settlements named Fort Somethingorother? What is a fort? Why did the settlers need forts to protect themselves? 

As I'm reading aloud, I ask students to notice evidence of the author's craft, times when the author defines an unusual word later on in the text, or actions that can tell us about a character's personality.

All of this noticing leads naturally to questioning, wondering, predicting, and connecting.

It's amazing that one of the smallest questions can yield the biggest rewards in terms of student engagement and student thinking.

That's what I've noticed, at any rate. What are you noticing?