Hungry Minds

I just read the Hungry Minds article by Ian Frazier. I did not really understand why the article was so 'special' or 'important.' I thought it was a cute story, but I personally didn't see where the author was going with this. It was nice to see how the author tried to get people interested in writing. I thought he could have written more about that, than the actual history of the church. There were many times where I questioned: What does this have to do with anything? Where is this going?

I honestly have no idea what the author was trying to tell me. Was he telling me about the soup kitchen? Did he want to talk about his writing workshop? Was he trying to use the analogy of the hungry people for the soup kitchen vs. the hungry minds for writing? If he meant the last one, I didn't get that. The author made one reference to it, but never really elaborated on it again.

Chapter 1 Image Grammar

What a great resource! I am only on Chapter 1 of Image Grammar and I already have a bunch of strategies I can try in my current and future classroom. In Chapter 1, Harry Noden talks about the writer as an artist. There are two categories of seeing for writers: showing and telling. Harry Noden, author of Image Grammar, wants to focus on the showing aspect. Like Noden says “Showing engages the reader’s mind as a catalyst for visualization. Telling lulls the reader to sleep” (3).

What I like best about Noden’s first chapter is that he explains the 5 basic brush strokes in a very simple way, so simple that you can use that same description on students. Noden also gives strategies to supplement his concepts. I actually liked most of the strategies. There was one that I think won’t work at my current student teaching location. Strategy 5: Tour a Writer’s Gallery is a good strategy, but I can’t see it working in my classroom at Brunswick. The students, I think, will just not pay attention during the strategy. They will just BS their way through it and not learn anything.