Your Own Writing Technology Assignment
Unlike some of the other posts, I wasn’t particularly concerned about this writing assignment (perhaps I should have been), but rather I was concerned about my lack of creativity. Blank, zip, zero, zilch, nada! What to do? I came into this assignment late and all the sudden, it was crunch time. I am not a creative person! My first instinct was to whine—much like my students do. I got into this to learn, not to be creative! Then, after a little thought, I realized that sounds just like my kids. So, I determined not to whine, but to get right to work!
I obsessed over it for a time, but all my ideas were nixed in the original assignment information. No, I couldn’t use food-not permanent enough. I couldn’t use blood—too icky. The permanence aspect was a sticking point for me. Did the word need to remain permanent, or only the materials? I thought about writing with pretzels or licorice, but those would obviously need to be glued on something to retain their word status and that seemed like cheating. I thought about using fabric and sewing, but for many years that was a valid medium, so that seemed like cheating. I thought of sand on a board, but there is no permanence there.
So, I did what every teacher in her right mind would do when creativity is needed: I asked my students. Before I had finished explaining what I needed to do, my little ADHD tenth grader had made 3 letters out of paper clips. To him, and to several other students in my class, this assignment is a no-brainer! They want to know why I do not give them fun assignments like this! They actually made some good suggestions: macaroni, magnets, candy, paper clips, icing….. Icing seemed like a good idea, but I feared it was too much like writing material—although I was in the mood for a sweet treat. One of my students suggested alphabet soup and was undeterred when I reminded them of the permanence aspect. He responded that he had found soup in his fridge that had been there a long time! But finally I settled on a surface to “write” upon and that is a T-shirt. After a long in-service day today, one of the teachers mentioned that she was going to go home and have a nice glass of wine. That gave me the idea for my writing medium.
It is not difficult to write with wine upon a shirt; after all, people spill wine on their clothes all the time. But I knew I could not use a pen and I needed a method of delivery. So, I used the plastic tube that goes into a spray bottle. I filled it with wine by putting the tube into the wine and pressing the trigger to pull the wine up into the tube. Then, I dotted the wine on the shirt to make the words. This actually did not take too long. I seemed to be waxing poetic today-my first choices of words ended up being haikus—too short, so I added a little. I was surprised that, unlike taking a paper and pencil, the medium itself seemed to call to me. The shirt, one of tropical islands, reminded me of vacations; the wine of enjoyable memories. The more I worked with them, the more they seemed to go together, and the more poetic I seemed to feel.
This leads me to the reading for the day. Ong stated that “separation is one of the most telling effects of writing,” and I can see that the medium of paper and pen or computer and paper does seem to separate the concept of writing from the topic. My medium of wine and shirt seems to draw them together. I would guess that many of us would have written something completely different on paper than what we wrote with our alternative medium. That concept, and my students’ reactions, lead me to wonder if they would find writing to be more fun, more challenging, and more creative, if I mixed up their medium occasionally.
