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Questions

Apologies Accepted

September 27, 2020 by Sara Nolan Leave a Comment

This week I had the privilege to write for Romper about my 5 year old son apologizing to me for 2+ years of his mom-direct anger. His words stopped me in my tracks. Reflecting on his gesture made me ask lots of questions. At what age can kids apologize, and mean it? When do we (adults, grown ups) owe them an apology? What does rupture and repair look like in families? I turn these questions over to you with a bunch of other questions attached like barnacles.  Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Essays, Questions, State of Mind, Uncategorized Tagged With: personal stories, self-reflection, vulnerability, writing prompts

Listening to Teens

August 3, 2020 by Sara Nolan Leave a Comment

I love listening to teenagers. The more you listen, the more they tell you. And if you're only pretending you're listening, or listening with an agenda, they know it. In a recent session, a student showed me that if I really listened, we could travel into a different eco-system, where caring for each other was part of the ecology. Out of your element, or in it?  A student was telling me about his love of scuba diving. Newly certified, on one of his first group dives, he was daunted by the oxygen tank, and the thought of bumping loose a cartridge. How to parcel out the air? His nervousness made him a conservative in what he would explore. (The analogies to COVID life loom). But he was also, I think, awed by the power of being in a completely different element, the underwater ocean, that wasn't really meant for us. Not in a sustained way beyond the doing the crawl or getting rolled by a hook-shaped wave. The Sharks and the goofballs came On his wreck dive with his family (also a pandemic analogy, there?), a family of sharks--and I swear he called them nar-sharks, to which fact my five year old exclaimed LIKE NARWAL NARWAL SHARKS??-- swam by. A small flock. Other goofballs on the dive went out of their way to take a selfie  of themselves with the shark pod with a long selfie stick camera. Scrambling around for the money shot. Grinning, peace signs, oxygen burbles. They were posing with their stupid selfie stick IN FRONT OF  A FAMILY OF SHARKS, he said, like zero common sense. I mean, sure, try to get your picture, but stop behaving like such an idiot. His dad taught him to hang back, to see if you could get a photo without disrupting the balance and bothering the sharks. Because: BOTHERING SHARKS. Be humble, he said. These are sharks. They just want to hang out with their families. As I listened to him, he relaxed and grew funnier.  Once I had given him his writing prompts for the week and we hung up, all I could think about was goofballs who  Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Questions, State of Mind, Stories, Uncategorized, Writing Tips Tagged With: anecdotes, college essay writing, desires, ideas, Listening

Mainstream English, or Is That Voice “Mines”?

May 2, 2018 by Sara Nolan Leave a Comment

student voice and whatever stream of English

College Essay, Your Voice?  College essays are supposed to represent the applicant's personality; as their paper doppelgänger, if anything should "center" the student voice, that's it. Personal essay  teachers are tasked with "preserving" student voice. As your guide, my style should be invisible behind yours. No ventriloquism here. But sometimes, easier said than done. And the issue is not just aesthetic, but moral. 826NYC & Voice Justice This week I attended the interactive workshop "Justice & Equity Dialogues: Centering Student Voice" 826NYC, an organization I've had a crush on for some time. They host their writing magic in a "secret library" behind a superhero supply storefront (I mean, you checked their site, right?).  So, enough said.  Their workspace has warm wood tables, exposed brick, and two clocks, for "Brooklyn Time" and "Manhattan Time." The latter is an hour ahead of the former because, well, you people in Manhattan rush a tad too much. Their library, airy and light, is filled with self-published student work side by side with destined to be classics like, ahem, that new ballsy Bunny Book by John Oliver. Language Unicorn The facilitator, Rebecca Darugar, 826NYC's Director of Education, began the workshop by asking us to draw a unicorn together in our small groups on chart paper with markers, no further instructions. There was no model unicorn for us to study. And yet, when we compared the four drawings, they all had...what? You guessed it: a prominent horn, a more-or-less horse's physique, a mane (but a rainbow mane, m'kay?). Darugar pointed out: See? A unicorn doesn't exist. But still, we all follow these rules, which we've created and agreed upon at some point, that the unicorn looks a certain way. And only that way. No one's unicorn had a giraffe's body, none a lizard's. An imaginary beast, it nonetheless cohered to a relatively limited set of features.  And (the main point of the workshop) language is just like that: language is an  Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Grammar, Integrity, Questions, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized Tagged With: access, centering student voice, college essay writing, justice, language, Mainstream English, student voice

Have Essay, Will Travel

March 1, 2017 by Sara Nolan

Travel to paris

It is exciting when I get to travel with my students for the long haul. Francesca, an irreverent and deeply talented student I first taught when she was in 8th grade, is now a writing colleague and itinerant scholar. She's left school, again (yes, you can leave school for good reasons)...to travel and write and to write about travel as a state of mind. Here's just a fraction of her story, and how her college essay became an important touch-stone on a journey of inner and outer travel that is not yet done. Francesca obligingly wrote this for you, as a case in point that your college essay can be so much more than a thing you write to get into college. (It also makes me pleasantly squirmy to be a protagonist/antagonist in such a fine story). Francesca's College Essay Story Travel Back When I walked into Sara’s house in the summer before my senior year of high school, late for our meeting and out of breath, I had no idea what I wanted to write my college essay about. Sara offered me a plate of avocado toast, and as I ate, she had me free write on a couple on prompts. I had seen Sara infrequently over the past few years, but in 2009, when I was in eighth grade, Sara and I had travelled around Europe and Northern Africa together. For a school year, she had homeschooled my sister and me, teaching me English, writing, history, Latin, and anatomy. We had spent many hours together most days of the week. Our year of traveling felt simultaneously central to my identity and far removed from my real life. It was like a dream that I couldn’t fully remember, but that continued to affect me in my waking hours. That is, it was like a dream I couldn’t fully remember until I sat down at Sara’s kitchen table with a slice of avocado toast and realized that, of course, my personal statement would have to be about our trip. Revision and Remembering I was very proud of the essay I wrote with Sara. I had never worked on a piece of writing so intensely, though I loved to  Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Destiny, Questions, State of Mind, Teachers, Uncategorized Tagged With: college essay process, deeper meaning, travel, Writing

Wrong or Right? A cautionary tale

February 13, 2017 by Sara Nolan

hands are right and wrong

Will You Get it Wrong?  If wrong was a flavor of gum, I'd have stuck it ABC style under my desk chair long ago, hoping nobody caught me.  I wouldn't want you to know it was ever in my mouth. But this week, wrong caught up with me. I have two colleagues at The TEAK Fellowship who would definitely win at Jeopardy.  They are the kinds of people who know the kinds of facts you'd find in toilet-side books. And me? Put on Jeopardy, even on my best day in my best thinking cap and with a high dose of caffeine in my blood, I would still lose by a wide margin. So when I went into said colleagues' office, and Ne whirled around to ask, "Can you name five countries that have four letters?" I said "Nope!" before I even fully heard his challenge. Ni leaned forward in her chair, "C'mon, you're not even going to try?" I had dizzy visions of failing geography tests in high school; of my art history teacher asking us to draw a free-form map of the United States and being able to come up with only NY, CA, and FL locations. "Nope!" I said, confidently. "Educator much?" asked Ne, who is always ribbing people just a little. I stood there, nailed. And stood there.  My mind was completely blank.  I probably couldn't have told you my zip code, my middle initial, the last 4 digits of my social. Mental snow fell. This was what it felt like in third grade when I was asked to do the 7's on the multiplication table. I remembered 7 and 49 and not much else.  Ears red. "Not even one?" Ni prodded. "Um...ok, Peru?" I tried. "Peru!" Ni said. "Yes!" "Ah....Mali?" I offered. OK, this wasn't so hard.  I knew some countries.  I felt my shoulders relax.  Now that I'd gotten two I needed to try for at least three, more than half the challenge met. "Mali!" Ne echoed, glad. "Bali!" I declared. Ne and Ni nodded in unison.  Wait, was I perhaps even GOOD at this?  I had passed the halfway mark.  Now it would be super-lame if I couldn't finish the list.  Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Integrity, Questions, State of Mind Tagged With: being wrong, humility, knowledge, questions

What is “authentic” voice?

October 11, 2016 by Sara Nolan

Your authentic voice? answer with an anecdote! The student in my college essay revising workshop tipped dangerously far back in his chair.  Even the chair was nervous. "Can you look at my essay?" He called.  No matter that I was in the middle of a sent-- He handed me an essay draft with tight lips. It was all about how he went from careless to caring about his school work over a few challenging years. "I don't like it." He said. "It's boring." He wasn't fishing for praise.  He didn't like it. "Well, if you are bored by it, it's probably boring," I agreed. I skimmed it.  Yup.  Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Integrity, Questions, Solutions, Uncategorized, Writing Tips Tagged With: anecdote, authentic, college essay writing, JP Morgan Chase The Fellowship Initiative, not boring, personal story, voice

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