Author Archives:

03

Jun. ’08

Being Adam

I teach at a WITS after school program in Pasadena, a city that’s considered a suburb rather than a separate place because it is adjacent to the city limits.  One of my children, Adam, is autistic. It wasn’t obvious immediately, but eventually I noticed that Adam was different from the other children.

Despite whatever associations you may have with autism, Adam was never a “problem child.” He completed his work, participated in class, and earned his place as one of my best students.

Every writer strives to have a unique voice; Adam, without question, has one. This is one of his poems.

Sunday, 1 P.M. Movie starts right now.
Watch the Giant Spider, 1975. The Adam Ventura Show, at 12:30 A.M.
Japan, Mexico, Korea, USA.
1957 Chevrolet, Bellaire Lowrider. It’s been to Chuck E. Cheese’s, America’s Incredible Pizza Company.
Hot Wheels. Mount Rushmore. Houston.

When I read his poems, I feel as if I am peeking in on a fully realized world where I, the teacher, am a mere visitor. Still, I had to ask: Why was Adam, a 4th grader, thinking about movies and cars that had their heyday before I was even born? What was the ‘Adam Ventura’ show? (Ventura is not his surname). Did he dream about Japan, Mexico, and Korea – what did these countries mean to him?

Like many creative works, Adam’s poem raises more questions than it answers. It practically brims over with invisible associations and personal, private meanings – a whole inner life communicated in a few terse lines.  The stop-and-start punctuation was typical of Adam’s writing.

I did eventually meet Adam’s parents. According to them, Adam will, to this day, go to his room, set up a drive-in movie (even though his parents have never taken him to a drive-in). Lining up his toy cars around a white patch of wall, Adam screens his imaginary movie for hours. Not even his parents know what that movie consists of or what, in truth, he fantastic story is imagining during that time. However, I like to think that this poem, in its compressed but nuanced way, imparts a rich, textured sense of what being Adam might really mean.

posted by Julian Martinez, Writers in the Schools

Posted by . Categories: Houston, student, teaching, writers in the schools, writing. Tags: , . 1 Comment

16

May. ’08

WITS Meeting House: Chelsey

The WITS Meeting House project unites creative writing with inspired drawing; hundreds of students, working with WITS teachers, created self-portraits, and 158 of them now reside on the Flickr site.

One portrait that I especially like was drawn and painted by a girl named Chelsey. It’s simple, yet striking: thechelsey self portrait hair is a sensible, realistic black, but the face is purple, the nose green, the neck blue, the eyes pink. A corona of colors surrounds her face. Red, yellow, and black, among others, make an appearance: the colors of the rainbow, but in a muted, somewhat discordant key. They colors been thickly drawn, so that the grain in the mark left behind by the colored pencil can be seen.

I am never sure, when viewing these pictures, how much of the final creation was intentional, and how much was accidental. The ambiguity resonates with me; I can relate to it in my own work, when the features that people like in my writing often seem like errors to me, while the parts I labored over escape without mention. Taken as a whole, one senses the struggle between the artist’s vision and the artist’s powers in the thick lines and rough edges of the Meeting House picture set.

Around the head, in a curved, jagged line that is easy to pull off in a drawing but much more difficult to do in print, Chelsey has written her poem. Superimposed on the riot of colors surrounding her head, it reads:

Swirl the curls atop my head with a black, dark and rich, like crow’s feathers.

The simple, perhaps unconscious aesthetic choice to make the hair the one realistic color in the face makes it click for me. I’ve never met Chelsey in real life, but I like to imagine that if I did, that raven-black hair would allow me to spot her and say, you look exactly like your picture.

posted by Julian Martinez, Writers in the Schools

Note from the Editor: It is interesting that out of over 150 student self-portraits that make up The Meeting House, Julian chose Chelsey’s. He does not know Chelsey, but she has attended WITS Summer camp for the past 12 years and will graduate from HSPVA this month. She is an amazing writer, and I suspect that the artistic choices made in this work flowed from her many years of creative experience.

This weekend Chelsey will receive a scholarship from Alpha Kappa Alpha, and she will attend college in the fall. Congratulations, Chelsey!

Posted by . Categories: art, Houston, poetry, self-portrait, student, writers in the schools. 1 Comment

22

Apr. ’08

Why I Write

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

George Orwell wrote these words in 1946, as part of an essay entitled ‘Why I Write.’ Some people imagine themselves as writers from childhood onwards; others grow into the role, without fanfare or deliberation. Everyone, for instance, becomes a writer in secondary school – through term papers, theses, book reports and essays. I sometimes wonder what became of the stories I would write late at night for my first creative writing class; like so many of my college papers, they probably disappeared at the end of the semester, orphaned on the trash pile that would follow my moves into new apartments.

Orwell lists four different reasons why people write: egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, the desire to store things up for the use of posterity, and ‘political’ reasons (in the widest sense). My own writing owes something to each of these. I like to see my thoughts congeal in print; I am inspired by art to create my own work; I enjoy thinking that my offspring might someday read my writing, and I write short email-friendly pieces to change the opinions of the people closest to me.

The children I teach could easily wait a decade before making a habit of putting pen to paper and still be considered writers from a very young age. Like me, they will probably partake of all of the above when they start to scribble on their own – to record a moment of visual poetry, have a grandmother remember them on Mother’s Day, or even change the world. As long as the writer writes, however, he is a writer; no identity or public image need accompany the act. I hope my students remember this when the need to write for school recedes but the need for writing remains.

posted by Julian Martinez, Writers in the Schools

Posted by . Categories: student, writer, writing. 1 Comment

07

Mar. ’08

3 Great Teaching Tips

frozen-brainstorm-by-jurvetson-via-flickr.jpgEven the best teacher can benefit from a refresher course. Patrick Winston, a professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at MIT, has made a video presentation on his teaching techniques here.

1) While Dr. Winston usually teaches college students, his ideas are also applicable to WITS classrooms as well. One idea he stresses is to circle back and repeat your main point. He observes that at any given moment 20% of your audience is probably fogged out. For a young audience of primarily non-native English speakers, this estimate may be on the low side. In my elementary school classrooms, I try to embed my main points in several different places so children can hear critical information more than once and carve out space for new information.

2) Dr. Winston also suggests writing a road map on the board before you start. By the end of the lesson, you can refer back to this outline to show that you have completed your objectives and rewarded your listeners. This goes double for children; they are naturally curious and unusually prone to talking to their neighbors, so setting out a rough outline of the lesson will reduce their impatience and extend their attention span. Verbal punctuation – moments in your speech that serve the same function as the dashes in this sentence – will also help to focus an audience’s attention and bring drifting listeners back on point.

3) The most useful tip I found concerns the question and answer segment of the lesson. As Dr. Winston points out, a post-question pause of 5 seconds can seem like an eternity to the speaker while barely registering with your audience. Hearing Dr. Winston say that made me realize that my questions are too rushed; I now strive to allow at least 5 seconds for my audience to respond, after I thoughtfully pose questions my audience can answer.julian-avatar-1107-128x160.jpg

That’s just me, though. I’d be interested in hearing if these tips work for you. Perhaps by combining these techniques with your own personal style of teaching, you can find ways to improve the hours you spend in the classroom.

posted by Julian Martinez, Writers in the Schools

(photo by jurvetson via flickr)

Posted by . Categories: Lesson plan, teaching, video, writers in the schools. Tags: , . Leave a comment

29

Feb. ’08

Breaking the Block

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When it’s time to write, some students confront a curious mental block. They understand that writing has practical applications, in addition to artistic ones; they understand that there are many forms and genres of writing, just as there are many different audiences for fiction and nonfiction. What they don’t seem to understand is that anything can be written, anything at all. The tremendous versatility of print seems to persistently elude them.

Typically, for example, I’ll have at least one student who claims he doesn’t like to write. That same student will often be the loudest, most communicative child in the classroom, the type to make contributions, for instance, without raising his hand. When I suggest, gently, that the same energy he channels into speaking could just as easily be applied to writing, I’m often met with a blank stare. I’ll say, “You just said this, and we’re writing a story with dialogue right now; why don’t you use what you just said as your first line of dialogue?” Slowly it dawns on him. A first, tentative line results, that often seems as doubtful as if I’d suggested he turn in a shoe or a piece of candy for the assignment.

The notion that writing can capture anything that can be spoken seems to fall outside the rigid conceptual box that many students assign to writing. Writing for them is often mind-numbingly practical: home‐work, a report, a vocabulary list. Our work, in a way, is convincing them that writing can be anything: a poem about the ride home on the bus, a few lines that work their alchemy on an emotion that otherwise would have been bottled up, a story that serves no practical function outside of the exercise of the imagination. If my students (many of whom are very young) can take that away with them, they will be on their way to becoming lifelong writers.wits-blog-pics-002.jpg

posted by Julian Martinez, Writers in the Schools
(photo by stewartbremner via flickr)

Posted by . Categories: creativity, imagination, inspiration, student, teaching, writers in the schools, writing. Tags: , , , . 2 Comments

18

Feb. ’08

Running for President

The 2008 presidential elections are fast approaching; candidates of every stripe and background are saturating the airwaves.jasper-johns-flag-moma.jpeg If there was ever a time to broach issues of democracy in action in the classroom, this would be it. While teachers should not endorse any particular political position, the students are usually ready to volunteer ideas of their own.

Last year, while teaching for WITS at Pearl Rucker Elementary, I had a chance to work with the students on a presidential election exercise. One of my students, Darion Waddle, wrote this piece about running for President, which was later selected and read by him at the WITS Young Writer’s Reading at The Menil Collection. This recording was made in the classroom; the students you hear in the background are his classmates, fellow fourth graders from Ms. Kamuiru’s HISD classroom. Click here to hear Darion deliver his address; the text of his speech appears below.

I’m going to be the President of my country because I want my friends, family, and country to believe me, for whatever it takes. I love my country. I will make America a better place. I will make my country clean by my army and stop the war, so no more men will get hurt. I will make America a better place.

I am the President. I will never, ever replace my job with anyone, not even for a million dollars. I will keep my job. I will love my country so much that whatever my country asks me, I will take the bad people out and keep the world a perfect place. I will give the poor my house. I will stop bad food. I will give bad people away. I will pay my army extra money for cleaning people’s houses, and I will call my army the Face Paints. I can make poor houses better. I love my country.julian-avatar-1107-128x160.jpg

Happy President’s Day, everyone.

posted by Julian Martinez, Writers in the Schools

Posted by . Categories: Lesson plan, spoken word, writers in the schools. Tags: , , , , . 3 Comments

05

Feb. ’08

My First Book

dinosaur-heresies-cov.gifI remember that the first book I actively sought out was The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert Bakker. It was originally released in 1986, when I was nine years old. I read the reviews in the newspaper when the book first came out and decided I had to have this book. It was one of the first mass-market books to advocate the idea that dinosaurs were warm-blooded instead of cold-blooded; at the time the idea was fairly revolutionary, although movies like Jurassic Park have made it seem commonplace.

When my parents drove me to the bookstore to pick up my copy, the bookstore seemed huge to me, much larger than bookstores seem to me now.  The book I wanted was displayed on a table stacked high with many copies. I still remember the cover: an image of a triceratops and a carnivore in combat, with the title and author’s name printed in blue.

As a WITS teacher, I hope that my students will grow up to have unshakable memories about books, reading, and writing just like this. I believe that everyone should have a book that corresponds to their first love, that inspires them to seek out new books and continue the exploration that reading provides. These first books embody a dream for the future; one never knows how those dreams will turn out.

In my case, after signing up as a volunteer at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, I recently discovered that Dr. Bakker, the author of my beloved first book, is the resident paleontologist there. If I continue to volunteer there, it’s very likely that I will be able to meet him and ask questions of my childhood hero in the flesh. It’s a modest end to my dinosaur saga, but one that I find immensely satisfying.julian-avatar-1107-128x160.jpg

posted by Julian Martinez, Writers in the Schools

Posted by . Categories: books, event, inspiration, memory, story, writers in the schools. Tags: , , , , . 1 Comment

28

Jan. ’08

Flotsam Washes Ashore in my Classroom

What is it like for a child to discover the wonder of the world?flo.jpg

When I was growing up, I lived in Florida in a little city called Lakeland about an hour outside of Tampa; I remember the first time I pressed driftwood between my toes, shook out sand from my hair and spotted a stingray in the surf (they were surprisingly common in Clearwater). Flotsam, a picture book about the seashore by the Caldecott award-winning children’s author David Wiesner, beautifully captures one such moment.

Flotsam begins with a boy who finds an old-fashioned brownie camera washed up on the sand. He picks it up and turns it over in his hands while the waves crash around him; he brings the camera to his eye and peers inside. Before long he is marveling at images taken in a variety of underseas locations: in a room full of fishes, beside a giant squid, across a seabed full of seahorses and mermen. These full-page images are lovingly drawn and painted, each one a tiny treasury packed full of color, creativity and detail. By the end of the book, the child reader will feel as if he has been taken along for the journey too, with a wealth of images to remind her of it upon every reading.

I’ve used Flotsam in the classroom, primarily with 1st and 2nd graders; the intricate detail of the pictures fascinates them, and many of the children enthusiastically point out and explain the witty visual jokes to their friends. For a young audience, I can highly recommend the book. Some children can imagine better when you feed their eyes first. Flotsam does a fine job of providing that sustenance for them, a wonderful adventure that rewards keen observation and multiple readings.julian-avatar-1107-128x160.jpg

posted by Julian Martinez, Writers in the Schools

Posted by . Categories: art, books, creativity, publishing, teaching. Tags: , , . 1 Comment

21

Jan. ’08

On Meaning

A few years ago I saw an author speak an Houston. During her talk, she spoke about a friend of hers who had passed away. Her concern was moving; she didn’t need to memorialize her friend, yet she freely chose to honor her with her speech. However, her execution wasn’t perfect. If her testimonial had been a service, complete with instruments, then a couple of the musicians sounded jarringly out of tune. There was an edge to her stories; some of them portrayed her friend in an unflattering light. At first I thought it might just be me, but a friend who had also been in attendance that night later confirmed my impression. We agreed that the author’s words had a double meaning, in which the edges of her speech cut against the grain.

It’s true of the literature we read, too. Our writing has unintended effects; it can reveal more about us than we meant to show, or speak in tones we would’ve preferred to hide. Sometimes, it can even make our work better.

I often begin the school year with an exercise where I ask the children to write about themselves. When children are asked to tell their personal history, they will often adopt a clipped, deadpan, almost clinical tone. They are recounting events that to them seem mundane, even boring; they have long since merged with the wallpaper of their lives. When we teachers read them, however, the details often leap out and grab us by the throat. Some children have experienced losses that are truly tragic; after reading their stories, their ordinary difficulties in the classroom seem trivial by comparpic.jpgison.

Even when we, as authors, think we can predict the effect of our writing, the example of those children shows us that readers will often glean meaning we didn’t know was there.

posted by Julian Martinez, Writers in the Schools

Posted by . Categories: essay, memory, writer, writing. Tags: , , . Leave a comment

09

Jan. ’08

Where the Story Starts

You never know when an unusual object might prompt a fantastic story. Perhaps that’s what the WITS field trips are really all about.

In a glass display case to the left of the Thunderbird versus Whale painting in The Menil Collection art museum’s Oceania section, you can see an exhibit of Native American face masks. Inside the case, on the far right, you will find a brown, fairly nondescript face mask with a circular mouth and two holes for eyes. The label on the wall identifies the mask as a one-time possession of Captain James Cook, a 18th century English mariner.

Captain Cook was a famous explorer in the Royal Navy. He charted many unknown regions on British maps for the first time; one of his trips recorded the coastline of California. He died in Hawaii in a skirmish with the native peoples; his death in the surf became a popular subject for contemporary painters. This mask once belonged to him. We can imagine him turning it over in his hands and perhaps installing it on a table or a desk as his ship bobbed through the seas.

Markers like this remind us that art is not only made by people, but also owned by them. As ownership changes hands, the meaning of the art changes to its owners. To Cook, the mask may have been a souvenir of his travels, connected to people and places he knew firsthand. To us, the historical context has largely disappeared; we appreciate these objects primarily as art, and secondarily as historical objects.

But by writing about an object, this mask for example, we can make it come to life. As times passes, our writing can become like Captain Cook’s mask; after the presence of its owner has all but disappeared, the art remains us to connect us to the story behind it.wits-blog-pics-002.jpg

posted by Julian Martinez, Writers in the Schools

Posted by . Categories: art, memory, story, writer. Tags: , , , . Leave a comment

17

Dec. ’07

Among the Antiquities

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When I teach at The Menil Collection art museum, I begin in the Antiquities section. We usually based lessons around individual works of art; one in particular stands out to me for its importance to writing. This is the votive statute of Eannatum, Prince of Lagash, a small alabaster statue of a bald-headed man standing with his hands clasped in front of him.

The feature that makes him most interesting to me, unfortunately, is usually not visible to the children. It is the inscription on his back, where the cuneiform script for ‘Eanneatum, prince of Lagash, son of Akurgal’ have been carefully chipped out of the rock.

The statue is Sumerian, from the area that would correspond to modern-day Iraq. Sumer, by most accounts, is the earliest civilization known to history. It was part of Mesopotamia, the region where agriculture (and cities) first developed. To gaze upon this inscription, then, is to see man’s first attempts at transcribe his speech – that is, to write.

Originally, cuneiform was pictographic; every symbol corresponded to one word, which its depiction resembled. Nearly five thousands years later, the earliest pictogram for ‘fish’ still looks recognizably like a fish. There is a beautifully direct relationship in these early scripts between form and meaning: words look like what they say.

Several millenia later, our Latin Alphabet has became so entrenched as to appear practically invisible to us. Our problem is the opposite of theirs; instead of struggling to draw ideograms in uncooperative clay, it is almost too easy for us to become blase about print. We have to struggle to remind readers of the visceral meaning of our sentences. A trip to The Mewits-blog-pics-002.jpgnil Collection can teach us about the history of writing, and show us the origins of the complex systems we often take for granted.

posted by Julian Martinez, Writers in the Schools

Posted by . Categories: art, writer, writing. Tags: . 1 Comment

12

Dec. ’07

Origin Stories

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I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. I didn’t live there long; within a few years my family had moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where I spent my so-called ‘formative years.’ I remember billboards coated in the dripping wax of a local bourbon manufacturer, the sickly sweet smell of tobacco at the state fair, and the hot air balloons they would launch every year around the start of the Kentucky Derby.

My last interstate move was in high school, when I left Lakeland High School in the middle of tenth grade for Bellaire here in Houston. One of my first memories was of speaking to newfound friends about the beaches in Florida and Texas, when Galveston was just an ocean-blue blank in my imagination.

In my experience, there are two types of children who move around: the children of enlisted men and women and the children of engineers. My parents were engineers. My mother studied chemical engineering at Pratt Institute, an art school in New York City, and to this day, she says she would have been better off studying painting. Of course, it’s fortunate for me that she didn’t: since Pratt didn’t offer chemical engineering courses, she had to take them at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn (now merging with NYU), and that was where she met my father. For me, NYC was always associated with grandparents, aunts, uncles, the immigrant section of Queens, and relatives braving the flyover country to stay for a weekend with us.

Everyone comes from somewhere. One of the joys of teaching with WITS has been hearing the stories of my students and seeing Houston outside its familiar context, as the backdrop to a strange new young life. I know that, one day, the students I teach will be telling stories like these, too. My hope is that, when they do, my teaching will make them richer.wits-blog-pics-002.jpg

posted by Julian Martinez, Writers in the Schools

Posted by . Categories: essay, Houston, memory, story, writers in the schools. Tags: , , , . Leave a comment

07

Dec. ’07

Writing in the Woods: WITS at the Arboretum

wits-arboretum.jpg

Children have excellent eyes. At the arboretum, we see proof of this.

WITS collaborates with the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center to teach nature writing to our students. The field trip is an exciting part of that process. I’m on of the writers assigned to lead writing there. Each small group of students is assigned a naturalist and a writer.

The nature guides always ask the children (and us, the writers) to point out any animals they see. To this day, I haven’t spotted anything that wasn’t already pointed out to me. The children, on the other hand, have picked out katydids, spiders, squirrels, turtles, frogs and snakes. They’ve seen mud dauber nests in the grass and spider sacs on the branches. They’ve done this while laughing, joking, running, and jumping between tree branches, while I’ve walked slowly and kept my eyes trained on the ground.

It could be that the children see more because they’re closer to the ground or have some physical advantage that worsens with age. Personally, I doubt it. I think, as adults, we’ve become jaded; it’s hard to us to see the world with fresh eyes. Children aren’t as likely to dismiss that odd color or strange twig as mere noise. Individually, they may be wrong, but collectively, their observations win out.

Places like the Arboretum remind us that youth has it own advantages, which we, as teachers, would be wise wits-blog-pics-002.jpgto remember.

by Julian Martinez, Writers in the Schools

Posted by . Categories: animal, essay, Houston, nature, place, writers in the schools. Leave a comment