Judith J. Katz
I'm planning to teach this curriculum Unit one hour a day, five days a week, for a minimum of 8 weeks. That comes to a total of 40 hours, which is just a standard American workweek. It may take longer, but I don't it will run shorter.
This unit will be used as the introduction to reading and writing poetry for 10th graders. It is my intention to capitalize on my students' ability to retain, utilize and make this vocabulary and these ideas an integral part of the way they approach reading and writing any poetry.
40 Classroom Hours and How We'll Spend Them
I hold these truths to be self-evident; every student learns at a different speed. In addition since one of my stated goals is to teach my students how to develop their own creativity it's particularly important for them to have enough time to think, dream, observe, make mistakes, get frustrated, find a way of organizing themselves, be successful and witness their peers living the same process. And I want them to do all of that in the classroom with me so that I can help guide their process.
Homework will primarily take the form of practicing their observation skills in a variety of directed and non-directed ways. For example I will ask the students to observe and write down the colors and shades of 24 items in the next 24 hours. Observation of this level of detail will enrich both their reading and writing.
The Same River Twice
It's been my experience that creative success is based on three factors. The three factors rely on the creative persons ability to: learn how to navigate between task and process, repeat that navigation over and over, and make each repetition progressive rather than static until they reach as fine a product as they are capable of creating.
I am defining a task as something I will require my students to complete, or produce for me on demand. An assignment.
I am defining the process as the methods and steps I will teach my students in order for them to complete the task.
As a creative person and teacher I think that it's crucial to be on the lookout for new processes, methods, and steps my students or I come up with on the spur of the moment. Spur of the moment insights can be illuminating for the entire class and can be incorporated into the general process. For example, the whole idea of this curriculum unit comes from a spur of the moment answer to a students' frustration with a task.
I want to encourage my students to understand that they are living in a Haiku moment, every moment. That by working between task and process in repetition they are not merely repeating what they already did. Since they and everything around them is constantly in motion in this world, they can't possibly be the same person they were the last time they worked between task and process. Even if that last repetition was a minute ago. If I can help them understand that they can't possibly step into the same river twice, because they change from moment to moment and so does the river, perhaps they will understand how to bring their freshness to the task, process and product.
