Walking Toward the Rising Sun Again with @GerDuany - An Activity for the First Weeks of Classes For Adding a Little Shine

Once again I'm teaching content area literacies and in the tradition of choosing a book to model as a focus for the semester I chose Ger Duany's Walk Toward the Rising Sun. The class is heavy with history majors and language educators so I thought this would be the perfect memoir to go with as we read Muhammad, Beers & Probst, and Best Practices for Adolescent Literacy Instruction. Two weeks ago I met them with my usual "Dear You Letter" assignment, and asked them to respond in the epistolary tradition. Last week they read each others letters and decided on a single word to capture what the letter contained. I sketched a rising sun on the board and offered each of them a sun ray. 

My point....we all need each other and we need to see our community as a glimmer of hope. We need to walk towards literacy practices together. 

This week, I turned my dry-erase drawing into a visual for conversations as we also read Lopez Lomong's Writing for My Life and viewed a clip from CBS about the relocation of refugee-background individuals from Sudan in the 2000s. This is all to build the art of supplemental texts, applying reading and viewing strategies, and putting academic readings into practice when we discuss Ger Duany's memoir in the weeks ahead. 

I caught one of my students already reading Walk Toward the Rising Sun when I entered the classroom and she admitted she couldn't put the book down. She knows it isn't for several weeks, but she is learning so much about culture and history she never knew about before. AND she's a French teacher. I love bearing witness to this. 

I came home last night, picked up a pizza, and said, "There you go, Crandall...3 14-hour days in a row. You did it." This will be my Monday-Wednesday all throughout the semester. I awake today, however, simply working on the piles of other work that I haven't been able to approach, as it needs to be done immediately because....well...schools are waiting on me. 

But I love the graphic of a rising sun sharing positive qualities about a human collective...that is the way a classroom should be. 

Well, hello, February.