Art Influencing Life

It’s the last day of April.  That means that it’s the last day of the Student Slice of Life Challenge.  We’ve had a much larger group of students participating this year. In fact there have been 674 posts on our school’s blog site.  I wish there had been more than 970 comments. And I really wish there hadn’t been so many that were “I know, right?” kind of comments.  Still, last year we had 145 posts and 338 comments. We’re headed in the right direction.

This year the thing that struck me was something I had not expected.  I expected that some of the stories would be short. I expected that some might not fit my definition of a slice.  I expected that there would be slices that were very unedited. I expected that I would be surprised by the voices that emerged.  I expected that I would learn a lot more about the outer and inner lives of these slicers. What I did not expect was that the writing might actually impact the actions of those slicers.  

Here are some of the lines that began to stir my brain.  

I am going to run the 5k, which is 3.1 miles. You may say that you never expected me to run in a race like that, but frankly, I didn’t expect myself to either. I don’t consider myself the most athletic person, but this will be pretty fun. It IS pretty good exercise. Anyway, I’m kinda nervous.

After I run it, I will make a slice about the actual race!

That’s example one, a kid who doesn’t think of herself as much of an athlete, but suddenly she’s running in a 5-K race this April.  Here’s another.

First you should know I very scared of heights. We were one staircase in and I already wanted to back down. My mom told me if  I want to go down she’ll come with me but I decided I wanted to achieve something today.

Starting to see something?  A girl who’s afraid of heights, but suddenly she’s spinning up the spiral stairs to the top of a lighthouse.  Here’s another.

I wouldn’t pet those.” My dad said. “Of course he said that,” I thought to myself. When we got out of the car, my mom, Alex and I walked to the donkey. Two teenage girls were petting him. When they left, I started petting it. Out of all the years we’ve been going to St. John, I’ve never pet a donkey.  It’s mane was very dirty and I was afraid he was going to bite me but he was very nice. He was so cute too!

A kid on vacation who could have easily stayed in the car or taken her father’s advice, decides to approach a donkey.  A writer has to know how a donkey’s mane actually feels, after all. 

And then there was this:

But before our friend could answer, there was another loud boom.  Now we knew something bad was happening, not just a transistor or something.  Everyone started to rush down from the bleachers and the police told us to head down the street away from the race.  My mom picked me up and I was crying. My mom was holding Alex’s hand and told Alex to hold Ben’s hand and to NOT let go.  We were surrounded by people all rushing and yelling and the air had a really bad smell. We got separated from our friends and didn’t know where they went.

I had read a book aloud (a book I’d just received as a Slice of Life reward).  The book was about Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon. It was an inspiring story, a story of a triumph over prejudice.  I thought it would be uplifting. Instead, it had triggered a terrifying memory for one of my students.

She didn’t run away from it, though, she ran right into it, and wrote what she probably didn’t want to remember.  Her father had been running in the Boston Marathon in 2013. She had been in the bleachers at the finish line, when a bomb went off.  She wrote about the confusion, the chaos, the fear, and the eventual reunion.

As we entered this month, I expected these slicers to pay attention to the moments in their lives, looking for small stories in their day, and many did just that. What I didn’t expect from this writing challenge was that it might lead kids to do braver things.  As I sat at home, slightly envious as I read entries from their exotic April vacations, I became aware of something else:  The way their writing was influencing their lives. I began to sense  determination.  These writer were pushing themselves to live “slice-worthy” moments.

I didn’t see that coming.

The Blunders of the Avid Reader

One of my students wrote a slice this week about her younger brother.  They were riding in the car, and he unintentionally cracked them up. He had been reading a story, and his mom asked him about it.   With great enthusiasm, he proceeded to tell them about the adventures of THO-MAZ. He used the name many times in his retelling, and at first the family was puzzled by the strange name, but as they listened, it slowly dawned on them that the young reader had never seen a name where the TH sound was just pronounced as a T,  and the AS at the end actually sounded more like the word “us.” They stifled giggles until they were worried about doing damage to internal organs, and then tried to politely enlighten their young reader about the odd spelling of the name Thomas.

Reading this, I was, of course, eager to chime in with three generations of similar stories  from my family.  First there was my mom, who read a lot of mysteries and melodramas as a child.  She was telling her mother how sad some of these stories were, because the young heroes and heroines were often having to come to the rescue of some innocent child who had been “myzled.”  That was how she pronounced it to her mother, that is. Her mom was a bit puzzled by this myzled thing, so she asked if she could see one of the books. “Ahhh,” she said when she saw the word.  “That word is pronounced a little differently. You can break it into two parts. The first is pronounced ‘miss’ and the second is pronounced ‘led.’ Together it becomes the word misled.”  Enlightenment for my mom.

As a kid, my favorite book was The Baseball Life of Mickey Mantle.  I read the book about ten times between 3rd grade and 6th grade. I’m not sure what year it was in that sequence, but I distinctly remember describing to my mother an incredible home run that Mickey hit.  It might have gone clear out of Yankee Stadium had it not hit the “fay-kade.”  

“Excuse me?  What exactly is the ‘fay-kade’?” my mom asked.

“Oh, it’s this kind of like fancy trim that goes along the top edge of the stadium.”

My mom’s eyebrows rose, and then a knowing look spread across her face.  She smiled. “I believe we pronounce that ‘fuh-sod.’ Is it spelled f-a-c-a-d-e?”

Sheepish look on son’s face.  “Um, yeah.”

My daughter was a big reader, too, but she had a bit more confidence in her own way of seeing things.  In a conversation when she was about ten or eleven, she mentioned a time when someone in a story was eating a “woffer.”  I knew immediately what she was trying to say, so I stepped in to save her from future embarrassment.

“Uhh, Emma, that’s actually pronounced Way-fur.  Like it’s called a Nilla Wafer.”

“Well,” she said matter-of-factly, “I prefer to call them ‘woffers.’”

There you have it.  I guess you could say that one of the few benefits of being “my-zled” by the crazy English non-phonetic language is that at least we get stories from our blunders.

Now, I think I’ll go have a Kit-Kat. I’m wild for those crispy “woffers.”