Today, we dove into the idea of a Quick Write, whereby you allow your brain to follow tangents in writing. Much of what happens in the English classroom is about staying organized, staying on topic, and sustaining and argument. And this is good.
But there are other kinds of writing! And sometimes, those kinds of writing muscles need a workout too. We stretch our minds when we allow them to follow tangents, and see where we end up.
The Pulitzer-Prize finalist Charles Baxter says that when he writes, he follows tangents to see if there is anything worthwhile at the end of them. Author Anne Lamott says that, sometimes, we find beautiful gems when we allow our minds to wander.
In Room 340 this year, we will sometimes do Quick Writes as a way of allowing our minds to wander, with our only goal being that we do not lift our pens off the page and even if we're not sure what we should write next, we can write, "I wonder what I should write next" until the idea arrives!
Let your mind wander; let your heart wonder.
After our Quick Write, we worked in pairs reading a short story by Isaac Asimov entitled, "The Fun They Had." Then we came back together as a full group and talked about what school will be like in the future, and how we think about school right now.
Our word for the day was antagonist, which describes a character or a group that opposes the protagonist, or attempts to get the protagonist to fail.
Our quote of the day was from Albert Einstein: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Have an awesome evening--and thanks for sharing your ideas of protagonists you admire yesterday!
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