"Oh Mr. Wolfe" (Sydney)

This morning Sydney graced us with a clip from the Genius Movie about Thomas Wolfe. She typed up the words so that we could closely examine the text and we loved it.

Every voice piped up with "I loved the line..." and we were all immersed in the words that lifted off the page and became our own word cloud.

It is so wonderful to be surrounded by writers who share from their heart, connecting words with life.

Then I ruined it because we sometimes do. I saw a moment to stick in some content. Oh, the MVP strategy! Then Sharon asked the question, shouldn't we just sit with the piece of text, hold it close to our chest and breath it in for the life-sustaining element it is? And of course, the answer is yes. Everyone spoke about the delicate dance that we must perform in modeling and creating space for enjoying the text. Not just to analyze. Rachael asked, "Do we have to dissect everything until it loses its meaning or can we just enjoy a piece for what it is?"

Every day in the Summer Institute we read, write, share. Today Sydney had something for us that we couldn't have brought in ourselves, because, we are not her. And I think that when we open our classroom to our students' texts, we patch together a community. A community that says, bring in what your read, listen to, see... Bring in your pieces because we want to know you. We want to examine your fingers, trace the lines of its print with our eyes. We want to ask questions, we want to open ourselves to you and all your genius.