Copying Tim's Refresh Refresh mini lesson

I used a mini lesson today that Tim did for us in Teaching Writing last year and it brought out tenderness from some of the tough, disruptive boys. I made overhead transparencies of the first several pages from the graphic novel and we talked about each frame, especially what could be "read" in facial expressions and inference. In particular, I spent a lingering time on the frame in which the father's hand is on the bus window and the son is on the outside touching his hand. When I got to the stopping spot at which the boys have said goodbye to the fathers and say that they want to make the fathers proud, I said Tim's line about writing a letter from the father to the sons about their idea of toughness defining manhood. Well, the most surprising boys wrote letters that contained messages of "toughness not being a man, but tenderness and feeling and not being afraid to cry." Really! I was blown away...and none of this came from the girls.

To be real, I did have to stop and regroup them at times as they got off task and chatty, so a 15 minute free-write took about 30 minutes.