The Grasshopper in the Window or What Keeps Me Teaching
Becoming a Teacher Who Writes - Let Teaching be your Writing Muse - Nancy S. Gorrell
Nancy S. Gorrell [+]
English teacher and poet
Description
The author opens the book by describing an event when a grasshopper came through an open window into the classroom as she was introducing a writing lesson on observation to a creative writing class. The author used the incident to develop a spontaneous lesson about grasshoppers, drawing on a poem she had in her resource cabinet. The incident served to illustrate the notion that writers get ideas for writing by observing the world around them, as that evening the author wrote about the grasshopper in the class in a poem titled “Sometimes Poems Come,” which she dedicated to her creative writing class and read to them the next day. The grasshopper event and the poem resulting from it is a wonderful example of the core idea of this book, for teachers to open the windows of their classroom, literally and figuratively, to let teaching be their writing muse, and to begin becoming a teacher who writes.