Writing for CAWP

One of the hoped-for benefits of the new job I am starting in July is the opportunity to do cool professional development and teaching community stuff.

So far, it seems to be delivering. For the month of July I am participating in the Central Arizona Writing Project (CAWP) Invitational Summer Institute, which, as you might imagine is a room full of teachers who care about writing and care about students and for at least 3 hours a day, we are writing, reading someone else's writing, or talking about writing. It is both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. (The impetus for this blog comes from my attempt at a professional writing project which we are being asked to do over the course of the next month, actually.)

Yesterday we had a guest speaker come in and share with us a really cool activity that combines language arts standards with American history content. She shared with us a list of events that had happened on that day in American History and gave us three writing prompts, each from a different point of view.

Events on June 4:

1812 - Louisiana Territory is renamed Missouri Territory (because LA is now a state).

1862 - Union troops take Memphis (Civil War).

1876 - Transcontinental Express train makes it from NYC to San Francisco in 83 hours and 39 minutes.

1896 - Henry Ford completes his first gas-powered automobile.

1912 - Massachusetts becomes first state to set a minimum wage.

1917 - First Pulitzer prizes are awarded.

1919 - Congress approves 19th Amendment (suffrage) and sends it to states for ratification.

1939 - The MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 963 refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida. Forced to return to Europe, more than 200 of its passengers later die in Nazi concentration camps.

1940 - Churchill delivers "We shall fight on  the beaches" speech.

1998 - Terry Nichols sentenced to life in prison for Oklahoma City bombings.

PROMPTS:

1st person: I was there when...

2nd person: You never know when you're going to wake up and a day will be one for the history books. You don't know it when you wake up, and you usually don't know it when you go to bed, but you...

3rd person: He/She was a complex person...

Attempting this activity made me realize how large the gaps are in my understanding of American history (I managed to write a SINGLE sentence about Henry Ford before drawing a complete blank), but it was a really cool exercise, and I'd like to see how to incorporate it into my class sometime this year.

This the little bit I wrote for the second prompt. I chose 1919:

You never know when you're going to wake up and a day will be one for the history books. You don't know it when you wake up, and you usually don't know it when you go to bed, but you see it on the newspapers the next morning--"CONGRESS PASSES AMENDMENT FOR WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE"--"WOMEN MAY VOTE IN 1920". 

You, of course, are thrilled, but you wonder what you father will say when he reads this. He married an intelligent, outspoken woman and raised two intelligent, outspoken daughters, but you know that, at heart, he is a traditionalist, a man who believes strongly in the value of the way that things have always been. You remember his disapproval of your new clothes, your short hair, the "radical" ideas you've been bringing to the dinner table. More than once your mother has had to break a tense, awkward silence with an amusing story about your baby sister's antics from that afternoon while the two of you stared at each other across the table, neither willing to back down.

You wonder who will bring up the topic first. Will it be your mother at breakfast, when she hands him his plate of eggs and bacon and toast? Will it be you, when you bring him the paper and his morning cup of coffee? 

In the end, it is your sister, sitting across from you at the table, happily shoveling down her oatmeal and managing, as always, to get half of it on herself. Six years old is too old to make such an enormous mess at the table, you think absently.

"Daddy, what's suff--suffer--" She has trouble wrapping her mouth around the unfamiliar word she sees printed in black at the top of his newspaper. You pause mid-bite. 

He looks up from the Business section. "Hmm? Oh, it's suffrage," he corrects. 

"What's that?" she wants to know. 

You want to know, too. You hold your breath and your piece of toast halfway to your mouth as you wait to see what he'll say.