Modeled after Mango (Street)

Haven't posted much as not much has been going on with your's truly. In my eleventh grade class, however, we have been working with the novel(la?--for some reason, my students HATE that word) The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. A collection of vignettes written from a young girls perspective, there is quite a bit one can do with the book, the most obvious being to have the students write a vignette of their own.

In assigning them the task of writing a vignette with which they focus on a physical trait they either share with a family member (or share with non one), I wrote an example of my own (with some help from the students in one class with whom a prepared a pre-writing mind-mappy type deal). Bottom line, students and I were using the vignette entitled "Hairs" as a model for their work. Here it is for your reading pleasure:

A Lucky-Go-Grey Kind of Guy

Sometimes when walking around the classroom I’ll catch a glimpse of my reflection in the screen of the television that hangs in the upper corner of my classroom. Occasionally, it will occur to me just how grey my hair has become, seemingly in just a few short years. I remember when I was a child, that my uncle had short grayish hair that stood like broom bristles atop his head. His sort of matching mustache lay below his nose like a sleeping grey caterpillar.

When I was a child, my uncle used to come to my mother’s apartment to lend my brother and I some male support and I recall goofing on him about his hair. It seemed way too grey for the cool, young guy that we saw him as being. Of course, years later when he was dying of cancer, it seemed appropriate, as if the loss of color in his hair was an indication of his life slipping away… kind of like the fur of a dog gets greyer around the nose as they grow older.

Sometimes when walking around the classroom I’ll catch a glimpse of my reflection in the screen of the television that hangs in the upper corner of my classroom. Now when I catch my white-ish head in the mirror or television tube, I wonder if I look like my life is slipping away, or as a student told me recently, “grey hair is a sign of good luck.”

I’d much rather focus on my good fortune...

Fall is my favorite time of year to write, run and walk the dog... all things I hope to get back to soon.

Breathe in, breathe out… YOU AND I ARE ALIVE!