Description
On April 5, 1994 … I was a senior in high school … Easter break … in West Virginia on a Habit For Humanity worksite with President Jimmy Carter.
News came of a celebrity’s death.
Our minds went obvious: Michael Jackson … or perhaps Prince.
Since this day, there have been countless speculative rumors circling around Cobain’s untimely death.
But it wasn’t until I recently read Tim Appelo’s article that I learned something uniquely interesting.
Days before Cobain’s passing, he wrote at length in his journal about a poem by Alicia Ostricker entitled “A Young Woman, A Tree.”
Man oh man … did Kurt ever misread this poem!
Not sure at your school, but my kids sport a ton of Nirvana apparel.
They love Kurt and all things grunge.
Hence the brainchild behind today’s writing workshop video.
I do two things:
1. I walk teachers and students through the process of what I call a Plato’s Play-Doh Discussion (a gamified version of the Socratic Seminar and Harkness Discussion). In the video, you can see all the truly great questions my students posed while they deconstructed the poem.
2. I also write a literary analysis of the poem in my typical “Bob Ross” fashion. Beginning with the introductory paragraph, I model at length how to use my inverted thesis heuristic. From here, we cobble together the body paragraphs with my syllogistic method heuristic (I even share some conclusion paragraph stems for kicks and giggles).
My students ate this activity up!
From Appelo’s article to Ostriker’s poem … this was a top-knotch lesson plan.
The writing workshop slides featured in the video are available for download
Reach out if you have any questions or need a helping hand — teachingwritingcoach@gmail.com
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