In this e-portfolio, I collected the favorite of my summer writings. Although I can always come back to polish them, and there will be not final revision for any one of them, I am happy that finally I wrote something. The less formal writings were mostly from sacred writing or my personal journal. The New Patio chairs was a personal journal, it was written when I felt the urge to write. I Don’t Get It was from Marathon writing at Huntington Museum of Art. I was angry so it’s emotional. I Want to Change my Hair was a sacred writing piece. I love it because it was the very few occasions that I wrote without thinking. I was so free, and I miss the sense of freedom. A Reflection of SI experience was an exit slip. I include it because I believe that how I got transformed by SI.
The technology pieces were about my first digital story experience, my first PowerPoint experience, and my reflection of using technology in class. I think they are significant for my teaching career.
Plecostomus, the final personal piece and the deep revision piece are inspired by an algae eater that I have for my aquarium to keep the water clean. He looks so different from other fish and I grew more and more curious about him. When we needed to write a digital story, I instantly thought of him. I tried to think the way he did although I knew “when you are not fish, how do you know the fish is happy?(Old Chinese saying)” I took advantage of his speechless and talked for him. This was the first draft of the poem. When I got the chance to meet with Laura to revise my writing, I showed this to her. She was encouraging and helpful. She told me to sit in front of the tank and have a close look at the fish. She said readers wanted to see the picture and know the detail. She said it was good to repeat, but would be better to go beyond that at the end. According to her advice, I revised the original piece, and here is the final version of the piece.
Since I was emotional involved too much in this poem, I decided to write from my perspective about the fish. I took the deep revision piece to my writing group. My team members offered valuable advice. Beth even painstakingly proofread all misspellings and grammatical mistakes for me. So I decided to use it as my deep revision piece.
One Score for Everything was inspired by a prompt of sacred writing. The topic that day was to “write about one thing that you want to change about education”. I had a glimpse of Heather’s T-shirt. It said “Our children are better than a score.” Yes, that’s what I want to say. I have been educated for so many years and teaching for so many years. Didn’t I hate that one “score?” So when I went home, I wrote a reflection piece about education in China. I blogged it for comment and took it to my writing group for advice. Although it is not a very well thought writing, at least it provided some “out”signt for Chinese education.
