Midterm Reflection

Last Thursday we were given our Midterm Assignment, which was to go to the library, find a mentor text and "write beside it" in the same style or manner.  So bright and early Tuesday morning our group met up in Atkin's library to tackle this assignment.

           At first, I think we all felt pretty lost.  The library is ten stories, packed full of books, magazines, newspapers, and the like.  A good mentor text could come from anywhere.  We wandered aimlessly for a while, randomly pulling books off the shelf to read a couple lines.  Nothing seemed to have an original writing style.  Eventually we ended up at a computer, and searched books on writing and even for "mentor texts" as a genre from the library website.  Apparently it doesn't exist. ;)









As we were searching the library website, we had an idea on short stories and found a book of them (simply because we didn't want to have to read a whole novel!) It was a good place to start.  However when we got to the sixth floor and began walking through the tight rows of book shelves, we discovered we wrote down the wrong call number! They are certainly intense at Atkins!

We never found that book, but we continued to browse from there.  We looked through short stories, poetry, (which I thought would have been easy to write beside... haha just make it rhyme!) and found a shelf full of books in Spanish, which interested me too. :) As I was scanning through books (which I could do for hours!!) Johnny had the smarts to go over to the computer and google "popular mentor texts."  Everyone knows Google can answer all life's problems. ;)

We ended up finding Owl Moon, by Jane Yolen, which was a children's book with large pictures and a couple lines per page.  How perfect. Our group got together and Cory set a stopwatch so we could write like Jane Yolen for five minutes.  This is what I wrote.

It was one fair night,
as the blue sky turned gray
like a cold silk scarf
as we waited in line,
my youth group and I.

We walked through the doors
as my friend paid my way,
someone brought pizzas
passing like low-flying birds overhead.

I had noticed her metaphorical descriptions, emphasis on her surroundings, and her repetition of the phrase "Pa and I."  I tried to imitate these in my quick-write. I think this project, and mentor texts in general, help us to realize the potential to describe something of meaning in our lives in a variety of ways. The challenge for us is to find the best one.