Some Other Beginning's End

I am not walking this morning; it's still a bit scary to walk in the pre-dawn hours, because if a car comes, there's no easy way along the whole route to get out of the way.  The Lutheridge roads were never wide to begin with, and now they have downed trees beside them.  For the next 6 weeks when I will still be commuting down to Spartanburg Methodist College, I will pay attention to when folks are at camp, and if it's a morning like this one, where there's a group who might be going out to make a Starbucks run before the day's events, I'll stay put in the dark morning.

Of course, in another 2 weeks, we'll have shifted away from Daylight Savings Time, so there will be more light in the morning.

Before I close this blog post I want to note that yesterday's English 101 class went well.  On the morning after the storm, I picked up pine cones and acorns.  

I had an idea for our next project, but also, I was struck by the beauty of them and by how many there were on the ground.

Yesterday I had students choose one item from the front table.  

Our first task was to write a description.  At our next class, I'm going to have them try to sketch the pine cone or acorn and then write the description again.

Yesterday, I also had them freewrite, beginning with saying something in the voice of the pine cone or acorn.  Then we listed some items on the board:  elements of nature, elements of weather, a geographical city or place--and I had them write about what that item would say, either to us or to the pine cone or acorn.

I had them choose 6 of the most interesting words from all the writing we had done and put them on a piece of paper--I collected those, and next week, we may do something poetic with them.

It felt good to get back in a teaching routine again, good to be doing something creative and generative.