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I expected to learn the alphabet in kindergarten, but I never thought I'd end my schooling by looking at letters. And liking it," Matt confided to his fellow senior classmate while looking through the dictionary. "Blasphemy, bacchanal, brazen, baleful, belligerent, befuddle, Bach, the Beatles . who ever thought there would be so many great 'b' words?"
Writing, from A to Z, can be taught in one intriguing lesson. Use the alphabet. Just ask Stephen Spender, who, looking for a way to raise money for AIDS research, sent one letter of the alphabet to twenty-six different authors with the instruction to write "a poem or short essay on whatever it suggested to him or her" (Hockney i). Erica Jong's contribution on the letter "I" reads:
The alphabet is
poetry's DNA;
what sperm and egg
are to our progeny,
the alphabet
is to the poet,
germ-cells,
single, yet dividing
like a zygote,
characters
encompassing
the world.
David Hockney added drawings for each letter, and together they created an adult alphabet book.
While driving home from school one Wisconsin winter's evening and listening to some of the writings from Hockney's Alphabet on NPR, it struck me as suddenly as a spinout on black ice-what a perfect writing assignment for students! Randomly distribute the letters of the alphabet and have each student write about something from that allotment. It was so simple that it was sure to succeed. What I didn't expect was the degree to which it did succeed, and the great leeway it provided in writing instruction.
I often start the alphabet writing immediately following an in-depth and thorough compare and contrast essay in which I stress parallel sentence and parallel outline structure. The resultant essays are well formed and supported, but they often lack voice and power. Wishing to layer additional instruction upon past growth, I distribute letters and tell students to take the weekend to look at the world through the lens of their letter. Bruised and battered from the compare/contrast essay, they are wary about writing again. In fact, playing Eeyore to my Pooh, they often complain about even their blind choice, "Oh, that's the very letter I didn't want to get!" Only to hear from another row, "Do you want to trade for...