Wabi-Sabi

I finished Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life over the weekend. Although it wasn't as comical as I thought it was going to be, it helped me to consider finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Also, something great happened. I found a word to describe how I've been feeling lately. Wabi-Sabi. Apparently, the author had been in search of this word too, and thankfully shared the word when she found it. She said she was looking for a word that meant "complete happiness and complete sadness simultaneously" where you feel "content, peaceful, hyper-aware of loss, in awe, perfectly, gently happy/sad" (205). She eventually found the word from 12th century Japanese history. Wabi-Sabi means "fusing two moods seamlessly; a sigh of slightly bittersweet contentment, awareness of transience of earthly things, and a resigned pleasure in simple things that bear the mark of that transience."

This is precisely the word I have been looking for. It's how I feel when I look at my newborn baby girl and am so in love with her big blue eyes, her round cheeks, and her pure spirit. I'm so perfectly happy with my child, yet I realize that this moment is incredibly fleeting, and that she will too soon grow out of this newborn stage, and eventually it will just be a memory that I will be desperately trying to cling to. Because of the "transience of earthly things" it makes this perfect moment of joy also a perfect moment of sadness/awareness that this too will pass as quickly as it came.

This is also the feeling Sayuri would often get in Memoirs of a Geisha and goes back to the discussion of the purpose of a fleeting life mentioned in my earlier posts.

Blogger of the Week Friday the 13th

Honors English Only:  

 

We will begin implementing something I'm going to call the "Blogger of the Week." I'm going to feature someone's blog every Friday. The "feature blogger" will be someone who has posted something that I believe is model-worthy and will help you understand the expectations of the rubric. In most cases, the feature blogger goes above and beyond the expectations of the rubric. I'm asking that each weekend you comment on that person's blog. We have seven more weeks of blogging and you will receive two points for each meaningful, quality comment you make for blogger of the week, therefore this will be a 14 point assignment. This 14 point assignment will be separate from your rubric.

 

 

Our first featured blog will be Jessica W. I would like for you to read through her page, but pay close attention to the September 8th post "Justice is Served." Jessica perfectly meets the expectation for the characters section of the rubric. Notice that she makes assertions on how the character changes or develops, but provides textual evidence to support each assertion and adds her own analysis to connect the quote to the assertion. In addition, Jessica provides a symbol to represent her character and explains in depth how this symbol represents each character's development and how this advances the plot. She also looks at all sides of the character and mentions several traits that are revealed throughout the story about each character. Well done, Jessica!

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

I'm still not finished with Outliers, but Barnes and Noble called and informed me that I book I ordered, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, was in. It's such a quick read, I'm already on page 92 and need to talk about it. Starting on page two, I haven't stopped laughing. The way this book begins is basically mocking the format of how books are published. Instead of being a memoir written like a narrative, it's a memoir written by meshing together a bunch of random stories and things that have happened in her life by putting them into a category and inserting this into an encylopedia like format. For instance, she'll state something like "Bowling" as her header and then give a short (paragraph or two) blurb or story about that header. (see example!)

 

Penny Kittle, author of Book Love, used this book as a model for a quick, beginning of class, prompt. I may use this in my classes to start class by having them use the header "LOCKERS" for example and have them write a short statement about what comes to mind when they think about lockers. 

 

Outliers

I've finally picked up Outliers! So far, it's been an interesting read. To summarize, it basically explores how different successful paper have become successful. It goes against popular beliefs that hard work alone can help a person overcome all obstacles and become uber-successful. Instead, it suggests that there are certain qualities, such as a person's age or birth month, that contribute to an outlier's success. While Gladwell does give some credit to hard work, such as the 10,000 hour rule, he argues that it has more to do with opportunities presented to these individuals. I'm only on chapter five, so we'll see where he goes with this. The most interesting observation that Gladwell has made so far is his assertion that there is an "intelligence threshold." He says while there is a difference between those with an IQ of 70 and and IQ of 170, that anyone with an IQ of 130 or over has an equal chance of becoming a Noble Prize Winner or something successful. He states, "once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn't seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage" (Gladwell, 79). I thought this was cool, since my husband has an IQ in this threshold. Here is Anderson Cooper's interview with Malcolm Gladwell. He states that he wanted to explore the factors surrounding those who are successful, rather than examining the successful person themselves. He argues that it's not the born geniuses or those with "luck" who are successful, but where and when they grew up.