Changing the existing reality, build a new model, FORMS

October 20, 2013            Mrs. J Musing .

Study notes:

I was looking back through my journal today; and noted an assortment of thoughts I had recorded in the last six months. I collected a few here to see if I find a pattern in the learning.

Chip McGregor

“…the  greatest means of impacting the future is to build into another person’s life.”

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model (or help someone else to build it?) that makes the existing model obsolete. –Buckminster Fuller

Thomas B. Aldrich

“A thing cannot be weighed in a scale not capable of containing it.” 

(Who can measure the potential of a human mind accept God?)

From “How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One” by Professor Stanley Fish

“Syntax gives words the power to carry meaning.” “Syntax (FORMS): “Tie yourself to forms and the forms will set you free.”

Edwin Schlossberg

 “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” (Create a content through powerful understanding and use of written FORMS….build a new model?)

John Green

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together, unless and until all living humans read the book.” (Personal content poured into the FORMS of our language; change lives.) The Book Thief had that effect on me; it is hard to ‘study’ as such, needing, rather to be absorbed and digested……….

All are welcome to add thoughts to my musings........

experiences, thoughts, words, FORMS, kernal sentences, September summary

Summary of September online writing classes: 2013

We are all learners – all ways. Our bodies are fine tuned instruments that absorb the sounds, sights, smells, tastes and textures of experiences.  Each learner develops (adds to, modifies) their own filter of understanding by asking their own questions and doing their own research – no two people understand in the same way.

Each learner generates their own thoughts about each experience.

In class we focused on the magic moment when thoughts turn into words: when unseen ideas, dressed in words, are suddenly public.

As Oliver Wendall Holmes put it: “A word … is the skin of a living thought…”.

And… we can only express ourselves within the range of our bank of words…

And… we can empower our expressions by learning the syntactical FORMS offered by our language for structuring relationships among words. We are focusing on recognizing ‘kernal’ sentences.

Here is one example I used with the groups.

It is the first sentence from: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

In the light of the moon, a little egg lay on a leaf.

Egg – noun – subject, ‘doer’ of the sentence.

Lay  - verb – action,  done by the doer

Everything else (phrases, adjectives, etc) add detail to the ‘kernal’; like heat, it ‘pops’ the ‘kernel’ into something with greater ‘flavor’ and detail. (Thanks, Smith kids)

Lovin’ words

Mrs J

identifying 'kernal' sentences, base clauses can stand alone, content into FORM

September 23, 2013
Invitation to write! 
Enjoy! 
Mrs. J

Pursuing ‘kernal sentences’! (Base clause)

 Remember you are looking for the - the doer, the doing, and often, 

not always, the done to.

‘Experience’ (read) these examples; ‘feel’ them inside, note new ‘thoughts’ that occur. How could your words add details to these words?? ‘Play’ with the possibilies....expand a few sentences with your own content:

 First - Identify the DOER and the DOING in each sentence.

11.    We launched our boat. (extend how, where, when, why?)

22.    Mom bakes cookies.

33.    Somebody else was able.

44.    Abstract knowledge is unhelpful.  !!

55.    Jenny is painting the fence.

66.    People make mistakes.

77.    He braked his bus.

88.    My dog slurps water.

99.    Everything is expensive

110.                  This gear is not shifting.

111.                  The fire is burning outside.

112.                  Grandma knits sweaters.

113.                  The cherry trees are blossoming.

114.                  Our streetlight went out.

115.                  Bob collects coins.

Begin to realize the VAST content that can fill the ‘kernal’ sentence FORM.

FIND examples from your own reading and writing to share on 
this BLOG.

fall 2013 writing on-line, FORMS, content, power of our own words

 Sept 9/2013           -from Mrs. J

Tomorrow morning! And Wednesday morning!

I get to visit with my writing students. I am excited!

We will begin our discussions called “Words inside of Me”!

We will think about and talk about our experiences and our feelings and our thoughts and the words that ‘bubble up” from all this thinking.

We will talk about the power words have to help other people know what is important inside of us. Our own experiences and feelings and thoughts and the words they generate make up our personal ‘content’, what we have to say about ourselves.

Your words, spoken and written, are very special. Our language uses certain FORMS that help us arrange our words into sentences which let other people know what we want to say.

FORMS ‘give our words the power to relate to each other…… to carry meaning.’ –Virginia Tufte

My goal-as writing teacher- is to help us all gain skill in recognizing the basic noun-verb-object FORM and how writers build on it, by studying the sentences of many authors from numerous books; imitating their example in writing practice FROM OUR OWN EXPERIENCE, deepening our own understanding of relationships among OUR OWN WORDS AND USING THEM WITH COURAGE AN POWER.

Older students, please, read and ponder quotes #1 and #6, for tomorrow, and share some thoughts-words …

All students are invited to think about-choose your favorite summer memory and begin listing all the nouns that ‘bubble up’ from that memory. Remember nouns are words that name *people, * places, *things, and *qualities (Ie. softness), and *ideas (Ie. dignity).

Yours in learning,

Mrs. J

The Learning Journey in Quotes; Ask, act, articulate, create, publish

Greetings all - food for tho't - you are invited to 

ponder and respond 

Mrs. J’s Musings   July 22, 2013

                    The Learning Journey in Quotes

ASK

“Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess.” –Goethe

“The educated person is someone who knows how to find out what he doesn’t know.” -Georg Simmel

“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is  not to learn, but to unlearn.” –Gloria Steinam

“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” –Eugene Ionesco

“I don’t pretend to have the answers but the questions are certainly worth thinking about.” –Arthur C. Clarke

 “If we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and are patient, we shall end in certainties.” –Francis Bacon

ACT

“We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration.”  -Frank Tibett

“The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion-these are the valuable coins of a thinker at work.” –Jerome S. Bruner

“Experience is a hard teacher. She gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.” – Anon

“The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.” – Charles Franklin Kettering

“Getting an idea should be like sitting down on a pin; it should make you jump up and do something. –E.L. Simpson

 “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.” –Marie Curie

ARTICULATE

“A problem adequately stated is a problem well on its way to being solved.” –Buckminster Fuller

“For me the greatest beauty always lay in the greatest clarity.” –Gatthold Ephriam Lessing

“More important than the quest for certainty is the quest for clarity.” –Francois Gautier

 CREATE

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller

“The voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” –Marcel Proust

“Discovery consists in seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. –Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

“Your sole contribution to the sum of things is yourself.” –Frank Crane

“The sun, with all those planets around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.” - Galileo

PUBLISH

 “A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, IT IS THE SKIN OF A LIVING THOUGHT and may vary greatly in color and content according to circumstances and time in which it is used.”

-Oliver Wendall Holmes Jr.