Aioi Bridge, Kimonos and My Shadow (#SOL15, Day 6)

I.

from Unforgettable Fire.

At the Aioi Bridge: On August 9, 1945, I walked around the city looking for my husband. There were many burned persons at each evacuation center. Their injuries were quite extraordinary.  I was walking among many dead people. I was too shocked to feel loneliness for my husband.  It was like hell. The sight of a living horse burning was very striking. This picture shows only a part of Hiroshima. The whole city was just like this at that time.  - Sawami Katagiri, Age 76.

The morning we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the sky was cloudless. The temperature at the center of the bomb was 300,000º C.  Aioi Bridge was the target for the A-bomb.  It was easily recognizable from the air.

Ground zero. 

Some on or near the bridge that August morning were evaporated leaving only shadows behind. 

II.

Beneath Blooms (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

20 years after the bombing of Hiroshima,  I stood on a stage and recited Robert Louis Stevenson's poem,  My Shadow.  I practiced that poem for days.  I was ever so pleased to have been selected from the class to recite it at the school recital. Dressed like all of the girls from my first grade class,  I wore a kimono--petal pink, petal soft. To this day I can still see the color, still remember the softness. After the poetry reading, the full class sang the Japanese folk song, Sakura, Sakura.

III.

Arms Raised at Night (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

In Ulysses, James Joyce wrote:

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”  

I think of Stephen's insight and know there is no awakening. For it is not only an event that marks us, but also how those recalled events are juxtaposed. 

The United States has still not apologized to Japan. 

Learning from a 7 Year Old Poet

It is morning and I am conferring with a first grader while her teacher observes. The child has written a poem about people rising early to see spring leave and summer arrive. This is the finished poem:

Summer Time 

Spring has bloomed out
under the tree of hope.
Morning is light.
Many have risen
early to see spring go.
Rapidly, watermelons start to grow.
The beach becomes a summer home.
The time has come for summer.
It has come to stay.

After we finish working on the poem, she asks to draw as she says drawing will help her to rethink the poem. At the end of March, I had the pleasure of teaching her in several 3 hour blocks and one of the things we did was draw in order to think through stories, add detail, and better understand our intentions.

After a bit more discussion, she asks if she can perform other poems as she thinks that acting them out helps to make poems.

As I watch and listen, this 7-year-old moves about the room dancing the poem awake. I marvel at her understanding of poetry and the inherent joy she finds while making poems.  She tells me,  "Poets act it out to feel the poem. I like to do that. It helps me answer."

Talking in Class: A Look at First Graders Engaged in Word Solving

The news has never been good about the number of minutes per day children at school get to speak, let alone engage in sustained discourse (Cazden, 2001; Dillon, 1985, 1994; Goodlad, 2004).  When learning at school was understood as the transfer of information from a teacher to students--the need for conversation appeared less important. We know that learning is far more complex than the transfer myth suggests.  Teacher talk dominates classroom discourse through lecture and the initiate-response-evaluate (IRE) model of questioning. Both of these remain staples in many classrooms, especially where the transference of information is still considered the main task of the teacher.  In contrast, the video included in this post offers an antidote to teacher dominated conversations.

One of the highlights from the CCSS is its emphasis on structured conversations. The CCSS authors write:

To become college and career ready, students must have ample opportunities to take part in a variety of rich, structured conversations—as part of a whole class, in small groups, and with a partner—built around important content in various domains. They must be able to contribute appropriately to these conversations, to make comparisons and contrasts, and to analyze and synthesize a multitude of ideas in accordance with the standards of evidence appropriate to a particular discipline. Whatever their intended major or profession, high school graduates will depend heavily on their ability to listen attentively to others so that they are able to build on others’ meritorious ideas while expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

In the classroom video below,  Michele Damiano,  leads her first grade students in an inference lesson through an interactive read aloud.  It is important to notice how explicitly Michele models and how engaged the children are in problem solving in order to understand words from the read aloud. The interactive read aloud offers an antidote to teacher dominated conversation while illustrating what a structured conversation can be.