Reflections and How to Reflect

As I am thinking about and reflecting on the process of reading and learning about Haiku as a genre, I like what authors Sarah Andrew-Vaughn and Cathy Fleischer have written on the topic in regards to the Unfamiliar Genre Project on page 105, "Just as Sarah introduces other aspects of this project using the tools of immersion, inquiry, instruction, and integration, she shares past students' reflective letters in order to draw out of her students what might be involved in writing this genre of reflection."
I love how she uses these tools, "immersion, inquiry, instruction, integration."
I'd like to examine each of those and what I have done with them.
Immersion
I have been reading a lot in the genre of haiku since I chose it.  It has helped me expand my idea of what haiku encompasses.  It is all inclusive at this point in history, when it first began with more contemplative and nature oriented subject matter. I've also realized how much it has grown in the U.S. and in the English language, after originally being from Japan.

Inquiry
My biggest questions that have arisen since first thinking about haiku and learning of its characteristics and structure were, "Do my haiku have to address nature? Do they have to always speak of the/a season/s? Must they be zen like and peace-inducing?"
At first, I found that it seemed like the answer to these questions were yes.  I found that that might cause me quite a lot of challenge in being able to cross those parameters and cover the subject matter that this UGP has asked of us, to address what it is to be a teacher, what are our writing touchstones, and what is our process as we identify as writers, and teachers of writers. All these things do not normally evoke in me a sense of calm, or a sense of nature and seasons.
But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized like anything, things happen in cycles. Just like the book, Pose, Wobble and Flow speaks of, we go through cycles, cycles of comfortability, risk, and achievement, or flow, where what we have been learning and pushing ourselves to conquer becomes familiar.
I then think that teaching can be likened to seasons and cycles as well. With every new year, we are going to have new classes full of some possibly old but mostly new students.  Just like with the spring come new flowers, new students come in the fall. We have crunch time, withering and crumbling time, maybe in the winter, or at the end of the year, and this can be likened to the seasons as well.

Instruction
I didn't realize how strict a discipline haiku can be and was historically.  So, not only am I learning how to pose and wobble and flow with the genre of haiku, but I am also going to be instructing in the future.  I love that it comes from a strict history of instruction as well. On scholastic.com's website on haiku, they describe how the most famous haiku poet, Basho was a Samurai in the late 17th century in Japan.  He came from a family of Samurai, and "to become a Samurai, Basho served a local lord who was fond of writing." I love that becoming a Samurai included this intellectual and very artistic genre of instruction.

Integration
 To me, writing is an art, and energy work, just like yoga or tai chi or chi gong, are also arts.  I love that Basho's discipline included the two.  And not only is writing haiku an art, but also a meditation. I wonder how I can incorporate the instruction of meditation and calming the mind with writing and the genre of haiku.

For this blog post, it was helpful to take author Sarah's words and apply them to my own process in my UGP. 

I think this is such a multi-layered and beneficial project that lets us as pre-service teachers take on three roles as student, teacher, and writer. It helps us empathize with each of those roles, and all the while helps us practice writing in a new genre.

Here's a Haiku for the day:

Calms my spirit now
Writing Mediation Mix
Balance Yin and Yang

Some more words from the book on metacognition which have been helpful to me in my reflection process, "Why would I ask you to write about your metacognition in the project? Well, I want to know how you were thinking as you were learning this genre for the first time. What things were you paying attention to? What were the lightbulb moments? What were your moments of complete confusion and frustration, and how did you work your way out of those times?" (Pg.107-8) 

I absolutely love these questions that she poses for her students doing the UGP and they are definitely questions that I continue asking myself as I am working through the last week of the UGP, and I will address more of them in my next blog of reflections. We don't always think to tease out what are our frustrations; I know I tend to push them aside as cumbersome and unworthy, but I think teasing them out and writing about them will help overcome them.  Also highlighting lightbulb moments will make them more real and discernible and memorable I am hoping.  

I really hope that future generations will learn to use metacognition in education from the get go, because I feel like it will help them flow through the cycles of wobble and confusion, and unknowing, and make it okay, and make it really awesome to know oneself and one's own process, one's own clockwork.