Making an Essay Out of a Journal Entry...

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

—George Orwell

      Somebody once told me that you can't make chicken salad out of chicken manure. I agree, but not wholeheartedly, for many times I find myself crafting essays out of even my most pitiful journal entries--probably because my journal is like a messy bedroom: I know what's in there, but sometimes it is hard-to-find what I need when I need it. My thoughts are scattered like dirty socks. My best ideas are somewhere under the bed, and that nifty scene about courage in the face of adversity is probably in the wash already.

But no worries, for like my bedroom--my journal is mine. Somehow I will find my best ideas, my way-cool phrasings--and even whole paragraphs that I can wear to school and call my essay.

Your Own Garden

(and the extended classroom)

“You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.”

― Jodi Picoult

     Where does the classroom end? If it ends in school, it dies. All we learn and practice and work to do in school fades into some blurry memory of possibilities lost in the irretrievable cloud of unknowing, We have abnegated hope and make little of our lives. We need to live out a new paradigm of learning—to extend the classroom and make our lives universes of learning, to actually, deeply and truly expand above and beyond murky and distant horizons, and to grow when and where we grow best, and that, I can say with confidence, is rarely accomplished in the confines of the classroom.