A Wednesday in Honor of The National Day on Writing

The hats were my idea. We had to have fun, right? I owe a great round of applause to my administrative assistant, Lois, and graduate student, Stacey, for helping this day come into full focus. Over the weekend, I purchased materials to put into a writing basket for English teachers at Bassick High School and delivered these to the Connecticut Writing Project office. Lois, with her fine eye for craft, creativity and spark, arranged pens, writing notebooks, chips, chocolate, bubbles, tacks, dry erase markers and cards in a wonderful display for the teachers. Then, the three off us transported these baskets from the office to my tiny car, Roseanne. They're smiling here, but I'm sure they wanted to kill me.

On Friday, teachers across the United States will celebrate a National Day on Writing and in Connecticut we are starting a couple of days early. With thanks to the National Writing Project I have been able to support writing instruction with a team of teachers from Bassick and, with them, think critically about writing instruction in a time of high stakes assessment, high drop out rates, data crunching, and tremendous obstacles.
If I was a presidential candidate (or Oprah Winfrey) I would be sure every teacher in the U.S. received tremendous support to be the most exceptional teacher possible. Yet, tapping into my environmental science degree, I am thinking locally to act globally. The baskets accompany Kelly Gallagher's book Write Like This as teachers work with students to express, to reflect, to inform, to argue, to promote, to propose, to create, to analyze, to interpret, to state, and to join a national community that values the power of writing.

It is my hope that teachers will leave a hectic work day tomorrow with smiles that are similar to Lois's and Stacey's (and do note, Syracuse is represented in one of the hats - Go Orange!).