December 16, 2020
I just finished War and Peace the other night. . . well, decided I was finished, there are 2 epilogues and I realized the 2nd was completely unnecessary so I stopped there. The book is powerful, and gripping. I was captivated the entire time. And to think I put it down 20 yrs ago
This is a thread about War and Peace, and also my father's death. And maybe other things, I don't know, I'm grieving. Something about the power of books often so blithely dismissed as too old or outdated. 1/n
I thought of this description when I spoke with my father on the phone the next night for what I did not yet know would be the final time. He didn't want to talk, so my mother talk most of the time. When he did speak, he sounded distant, weary, and I later thought of this passage
"...but it was obvious that he failed to understand, not because he lacked the power to do so but because he understood something else; something the living did not and could not understand; and which wholly occupied his mind."
"In his words, his tone, and especially in that calm, almost antagonistic look could be felt an estrangement from everything belonging to this world, terrible in one who is alive. Evidently only with an effort did he understand anything living; . . . "
because I thought it was boring! I just didn't give it a chance. Anyway, there's those scenes with Prince Andrew as he is dying, and Natasha and Princess Mary realize that he is dying because he becomes distant. . .
Not quite sure what this thread was really about, but there it is. I feel a bit better.
War and Peace gave me an lens for a deeper understanding of real life. That's what great books do. I encourage you to pick it up and read it, in case you have been thinking it was too this or too that.
But thinking back to that last call, and how before saying goodbye that night, he asked for the phone back from my mother and said, "I love you" one final time. It clearly took him a lot of effort.
But of course, I pushed it aside in my mind, and carried on, as we do. Then received the terrible news today that he had died suddenly in the night. He has been battling cancer and receiving chemo, but he seemed to be handling it well. All it took was 2 days.
"With a great effort he tried to return to life and to see things from their point of view.
...'Yes, to them it must seem sad!" he thought. "But how simple it is.'"
July 19, 2021
. . . not to mention many higher-level skills such as genre and text structure knowledge, executive function, text comprehension, even pragmatics (how do they choose to communicate in this medium to this audience on this task)?
One of the richest, and often overlooked, sources of information on students is their writing. Taking time to deeply examine their writing as a team can provide guidance on instructional strengths and needs in phonology, orthography, vocabulary, syntax, motor skills. . . .
If you want to know a student well, take the time to read and examine their writing at a word, sentence, and discourse level. As a team. It will tell you things you don't see in any other source of data. In combination with those other sources, it can be very powerful.