Rattlebone Assignment

Rattlebone Writing Assignment

RATTLEBONE WRITING ASSIGNMENT: After reading Rattlebone by Maxine Clair, write a short story (at least 4 pages, double-spaced, 12 point font) that uses setting and time in American history as background for a "coming of age" story with a young protagonist.  Your story should reveal the impact this important event has on the protagonist.

Do research on your important "historical" event to provide accurate details in your story.

If you have an idea for the story, speak to Ms. Gamzon about it.  If you are looking for an idea, start with your own birthday and look it up in "This Day in American History."


Background for Rattlebone

The Civil Rights Movement in the American South was a struggle for the civil rights in the modern times. It challenged the racism in America and made the country a humane society for all. Some of the popular people who participated in this movement were Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall and The Little Rock Nine. The Civil Rights Movement Timeline discloses the important events in this historical movement


Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,  (1954),was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students and denying black children equal educational opportunities unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which reinforced segregation. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and the civil rights movement

Civil Rights Movement Timeline1954: The American Supreme Court declared the segregation in public schools in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka ruling as unconstitutional. 

1955: Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to give her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1st as required by the city ordinance. The bus boycott was launched. The bus segregation ordinance was declared unconstitutional. Segregation on interstate buses and trains was banned by Federal Interstate Commerce Commission. 

1956: Coalition of Southern congressmen demanded for massive resistance to Supreme Court desegregation rulings. On 21st December, the Montgomery buses desegregated. 

1957: Arkansas governor Orval Rubus used the National Guard to prevent nine black students from attending a Little Rock High School. According to the court order, President Eisenhower sent the federal troops to keep up with the court order to avoid the segregation in schools. Garfield High School became the first Seattle high school having more than 50% nonwhite students. 

Rattlebone

AGENDA:

WARM-UP:  Work on quill.org exercises

https://blog.wordgenius.com/to-em-dash-or-not-to-em-dash/

READING:
Rattlebone discussion and handout discussion questions.

WRITING:
Work on 15 sentence poem.

MAJOR ASSIGNMENT:
Brainstorm ideas and begin collecting images on a padlet.

Rattlebone/15 Sentence Portrait Poem

AGENDA:

We will discuss Rattlebone reading on Wednesday.  Make sure you've read the first 4 chapters!
There will be a reading quiz!

Continue to finish your POV Exercise from previous post.  When you finish that, begin work on a
15 Sentence Poem.
Examples:
https://newtreemom.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/the-fifteen-sentence-portrait-slice-21/

https://jeriwb.com/writers-workout-15-sentence-portrait-poem-317/

https://www.wattpad.com/109600281-poetry-book-15-sentence-portrait-1


Follow the directions for each sentence on a Google document.  Then try to shape your responses into a poem using lines and stanzas for formatting.

The Fifteen-Sentence Portrait

This assignment will generate descriptive writing. It is purposefully guided. So, begin by choosing a person to describe. Then follow the directions.

BEGINNING:
1. Picture in your mind a person you have strong feelings for. The subject may not be a "love" interest, but should be someone you feel strongly about. The person can be living or dead but should be someone you know or knew rather than a famous character.

2. For a title, choose an emotion or a color that represents this person to you. You will not mention the individual’s name in the writing.

3. For a first-line starter, choose ONE of the following and complete the sentence:

1. You stand there . . .
2. No one is here . . .
3. In this (memory, photograph, dream, etc.), you are . . .
4. I think sometimes . . .
5. The face is . . .
6. We had been . . .

• THEN:
• 1. Following your first sentence, build a portrait of this individual, writing the sentences according to these directions:

•   Sentence 2: Write a sentence with a color in it.
•   Sentence 3: Write a sentence with a part of the body in it.
•   Sentence 4: Write a sentence with a simile (a comparison using like or as).
•   Sentence 5: Write a sentence of over 25 words.
•   Sentence 6: Write a sentence under 8 words.
•   Sentence 7: Write a sentence with a piece of clothing in it.
•   Sentence 8: Write a sentence with a wish in it.
•   Sentence 9: Write a sentence with an animal in it.
• Sentence 10: Write a sentence in which three or more words alliterate; that is, they begin with the same initial consonant: she has be left, lately, with less and less time to think . . .
•   Sentence 11: Write a sentence with two commas.
•   Sentence 12: Write a sentence with a smell and a color in it.
•   Sentence 13: Write a sentence with a simile (a comparison using like or as).
•   Sentence 14: Write a sentence that could carry an exclamation point (but do not use the exclamation point).
•  Sentence 15: Write a sentence to end this portrait that uses the word or words you chose for a title.

• 1. Next, read the portrait. Underline sentences in which you discovered new things about this individual or your feelings and attitudes toward him or her.
• 2. Now, use this portrait as a starting point for a poem or prose portrait or simply revise what you have. (Be sure to keep a copy of the original, so that you can examine the changes between original and revised piece.) Do anything you need to make this a piece of writing that you like. Choose a new title, use the person’s real name, and so on. 

POV--Point of View in Stories--Rattlebone

AGENDA:

EQ: What is POV and how do writers choose the right point of view for their stories?

Bellwork:  Go to vocabulary.com.  Sign-in at http://vocab.com/join/3Q1EXY9 to join class.
Do assignment: 100 Words Every Middle Schooler Should Know


POINT OF VIEW:

https://prowritingaid.com/art/303/What-is-POV-And-How-Do-You-Choose-the-Best-POV-for-Your-Story.aspx

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKi56cPUSFk

http://www.thebeginningwriter.com/2012/03/look-at-different-types-of-point-of.html

https://www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/6_tips_to_choosing_the_right_point_of_view

https://jerichowriters.com/points-of-view-fiction/

Rattlebone:  Lemonade--discuss story
Read beginning of "Water Seeks Its Own Level"--discuss POV

EXERCISE in POV:

2. Thomas, Linda, church, parents, prayer

Point of View: _________________________________________

Story:_______________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________

3. Dannie, Kyle, garden, sunny, flowers

Point of View: _________________________________________

Story:_______________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________

4. Victoria, Harrison, park, dog, trees

Point of View: _________________________________________

Story:_______________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________

5. Michael, Janet, party, dancing, eating

Point of View: _________________________________________

Story:_______________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________

WRITING: Turn in Natalie Goldberg Test #1

HMWK: Read "Water Seeks Its Own Level" and "Cherry Bomb"

Rattlebone/Subject-Verb agreement

AGENDA:

1. Go to quill.org.  Practice subject-verb agreement 1 and 2 in Activity pack.

2. Rattlebone--Go over Maxine Clair's background and poetry from last class.

https://www.enotes.com/topics/rattlebone

http://www.supersummary.com/rattlebone/summary/

https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/brown-v-board-of-education-of-topeka
Continue reading of book.

HMWK:
Read Lemonade in Rattlebone
Finish Natalie Goldberg's Test 1

Maxine Clair and Rattlebone

AGENDA:

Complete work from last class.  Finish Author Bio.

Quill.org---sign-in with your Google account--take diagnostic

Take the pretest and post your results:
http://www.grammarbook.com/grammar_quiz/grammar_pretest.asp

Maxine Clair Rattlebone

 Go to library and pick up Rattlebone.

 Read about Maxine Clair:


http://www.washburn.edu/reference/cks/mapping/clair/index.html

READING:

Maxine Clair's Poetry

ROSEDALE, KANSAS
Mirages hovered above undulant highways
and summer stomped his dusty feet,
conjured up sunflowers
that ran wildly through fields of cornsilk.
Giant brown faces with yellow rays
stampeded to pavement edge
and stood cooling their feet in the clay.
Blue racers that slept between slats
of a swinging bridge became Python.
Roused by Amazon and Watusi
they slithered to a rocky cathedral
in the creek bed,
and choirs of cicada droned a fugue
of The Seven-Fold Amen.
When the moon like new silver
rolled on edge across black velvet,
Orion laid down his shield
to play hide-and-seek with lightning bugs.
Children caught his eyes in mason jars,
kept the stars to hold to
and went to seek their fortunes.

PENMANSHIP Cursive writing separated us from the little kids that year, promised us we would be flourishes of gold ink on a white bond expanse of future. Letters flowed into one another like jacks, bangs, secrets, and banana caramels, spelling out girlfriends. Then Norma's mother died: draped in a navy blue sheet, put into a Black Maria, lowered into a hole. We went away searching for Norma's mistake, one something more fleeting than Orpheus' backward glance that set this thing in motion. We sensed it then. Like a teacher with the final word it would stand stark, guiding our lives as we made ovals, strokes, loops, and slants, each of us outlining one unknowable letter in the endless alphabet.

DEJA VU
Like a yellow flag, my mind plants
a singpost for itself, a re-vision
of something I've never seen, the re-seeing
of a scene I never wrote. Here it is again,
Soweto. Women walking on a road. Bodies
shaped in angles that hold a three-sided
fury with gnarled hair; slender shadows
whose reappearance could give me the chance
to rewrite my descriptive passages of the corpses
they bear, the blood they wring from their skirts.
As if clairvoyance were a gift, I've been given
the second sight of girls, boys, silhouetted
against a casaba moon, slipping past a gatekeeper
into cliché: thousands dead or missing.
And living is a sending out of moments. That
is the gift. Each must come back in deja vu
like a pod on a bough of the akee-fruit tree,
opening in its time, round with delight or venom.


COAL OIL AND SUGAR, 1954
When the nine o'clock whistle blows
our way, we can smell manure and bacon
from the packing house across the river.
The August night sky leans down for us
to touch. Mamma Hayes braids her hair
on her porch. Down the block somebody
yells, All hid? Next door Georgie, who's
too slow to read and cannot go to school, begs to stay
outside until ten when the street light goes out
and we go to bed thinking of school one sleep away.
Attucks, Wheatley, Douglass--mostly names
of schools we know, Dunbar Annex is ours,
a haven on the second floor of the Agency
where official workers must not be disturbed.
Hear our verses opening the day, reluctantly
at first, God is love. Make a joyful noise...
See us reciting in single file, eight rows
of faces, brown and artless as sunflowers:
.....Between the dark and the daylight,
.....When the night is beginning to lower,
our skinny stalks rooted to this soil
of English, arithmetic, geography.
We lift our voices and sing--not the dirges
yet, not the curses we will learn before
we sing love songs again. Black still verges
on the profane, the color of a bad word for female
dogs; for weapons, loaded snowballs in February,
on our sleds all day, a dose of coal oil and sugar
down our throats to ward off whooping cough. With
pudding and juniper tea our evenings boil over
like a pot on the back burner whose steam
rises and stains the wallpaper in shapes we dream
about. We cannot know that when we turn this page,
a schoolboy face with a bullet hole, the murdered
face of Emmet Till, will find those shapes.
The smooth, tied hands with mud from the bottom
of the river will worry our dreams like blood
on snow. We lift our voices and sing. Negro
History Week and we have forgotten the second
stanza but not our catechism. We know
the list: Ira Aldridge, Marian Anderson, Benjamin
Banneker, Ralph Bunche, George Washington Carver,
W.E.B. DuBois, Duke Ellington, Marcus Garvey
and on. Twenty-five Negro Leaders. We cut their
mythical figures from the glossy pages of Ebony
where they tell us to learn all we can, be twice
as bright. We ignore this reading lesson.
Those Negroes are history. They can bring
nothing from yesterday. We are today. In the only
future we can see, we are sliding downhill into spring.


THE ADULTERERS
In the first place
don't mess with no Pharisee men.
They don't mind taking your time,
but they treat you back-street.
Before they picked up stones,
threatening my life trying to make
a paint, sleeping with another
woman's man wasn't really no thing,
more like a little story to spruce up
the big one, but never a real
climax, know what I mean?
I said vows.
They said vows, too. We never
hurt nobody so I was too through
when this gang of priests and elders
--Pharisees mind yuo--come hauling
me out early in the morning
just for sleeping with a woman's
husband while she was off
in the valley. They grabbed
me round my neck, threw me
out in the road, tore my new
wine-colored robe with teh silver
threads around the hem. I would
have fought them if it wasn't
for the Man they brought me to.
He was squatting in the dust
and they called out to Him. Sounds
to me like they trying to catch Him
in a lie about being a teacher
and all. By now they picking up
stones and asking Him what he knows
about Moses' law that says
I'm supposed to die.
Well now, this Teacher stands up
and the sun's bouncing off Him
like gold pieces and He looks at me.
Let me tell you, I know when a man
wants me and let me tell you
He didn't. And he didn't pity
me either. He wasn't even lording
it over me. He just looked.
And way back deep in His eyes,
see like I could see a kind
of thing that the love I been
having couldn't touch. Looking
at Him was like falling
in the sea and the longer I looked
I could see He don't speak nothing
but pure truth and it got me
thinking about vows and such.
Like: they different from words,
they real, alive. Must be living
truth. If that's so, when a man
and woman vow it, they can get the same
feeling between them as a mother and child,
and as two brothers all at the same time
'cause they choose it and if that's so,
when they say I do, they talking about
a whole life thing that don't
get broken just from sleeping
with someone else. But nobody in their
right mind would want to come
between that kind of feeling anyway.
It would be an empty thing,
like hollering in a cave with no
echo--nothing you send comes back,
you can't get no real connection.
I was looking in the eyes
of this Man and I was making
a whole lot of sense to myself.
Well the Teacher Man looks
at these Pharisees and asks if any
of them ever done anything wrong
like lie or steal or call somebody
out of their name or swear or cheat
or gossip. Of course nobody
can say nothing. Then said this
Teacher, Whoever is without
the tiniest bit of sin can throw
the first stone at this woman,
taking about me. By then I
wasn't even scared. They all
tucked tail andslinked off.
And then He says to me, Go
and I went.
Since then I ain't had nothing
to do with nothing that wasn't truth,
especially no Pharisees.


SUNDAY
there were times she would play the piano
she would throw back her head and her wavy black hear would dangle
she would strike the chords and move on the piano stool and sing
Lord Jesus can I have a talk with you
Lord Jesus won't be long till I'll be through
and tears would be streaming down puffy rust cheeks
if there is no God there ought to be
the way she played and cried



Maxine Clair is the author of Coping With Gravity, a collection of poems. Rattlebone, a collection of short stories set in her native Kansas, won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for fiction and the American Library Association's Black Caucus Award. Her novel, October Suite, also set in the Midwest, was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Clair is Professor of English at The George Washington University in Washington, DC, where she teaches creative writing.

Welcome Class of 2023!

AGENDA:

1. Welcome and Introductions
Welcome to SOTA's  Creative Writing Lab and the Creative Writing program.  
Welcome video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH3akqBwYfo 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY

2. Explanation of seating arrangement, how to sign in to the computer for the year and save this blog as a favorite.
How to log in: (MM/DD/YYYY)
Go to blog: http://grammarandstyle09.blogspot.com
Save as favorite.

3. Sign in to Google classroom

Google Classroom ba5y3l and attach Grammarly at Grammarly.com

4. Explain Course Criteria/Writing Lab procedures and assign lockers!  Return signed course criteria sheet for credit TUESDAY!

5. Activity: Pass out journals.  Sign out Rattlebone on Friday.

6. Morning Reflection #1. POST RESPONSE FOR CREDIT TODAY!
https://ed.ted.com/lessons/does-grammar-matter-andreea-s-calude#digdeeper 


7. Write a short biographical paragraph about yourself in the 3rd person (he or she) for the publication of your new book. Describe yourself to let your reading public know more about who you are, what you have accomplished, what interests you, and what your life is like.

Example:
Alexander Christie is currently a 9th grade creative writing major at School of the Arts. He is 13 years old. He currently lives with his parents in Rochester, New York and has a sister studying theatre in New York City. In his free time, he enjoys reading books and writing short stories. His family is very supportive of his writing and everything else he is invested in. Although he hasn’t written any long term pieces of writing, he hopes to write and publish a novel someday. Aside from writing, he also enjoys singing, dancing, and acting in various productions. He loves living in an arts community and being able to do the things he loves. Going into his 9th grade year, he is excited to be learning new things about writing and himself. He hopes that he can continue to express himself through the arts after school, and share his knowledge with the world.

Share these bios.  Post on blog.

8. Expectations

• How do you want me to treat you?
• How do you want to treat one another?
• How do you think I want to be treated?
• How should we treat one another when there's a conflict?

Norms for Discussion:

Student Rights: 

1. You have the right to ask questions. 

2. You have the right to be treated respectfully. 

3. You have the right to have your ideas discussed, not you personally. 

Student Responsibilities: 

1. You must speak loudly enough for others to hear. 

2. If you cannot hear or understand what someone says, you must ask him or her to say it again. 

3. You are expected to agree or disagree (and explain why) in response to other people’s ideas.

9. More about grammar:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEwQxSDuAtc
https://ed.ted.com/lessons/does-grammar-matter-andreea-s-calude
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0211/4926/files/P-Sentences-Zoom.jpg?11916733149575478088

10. Quill.com--Take diagnostic (go to Google classroom assignment)