Ode to an Orange

 

One my family’s favorite stories is when my little sister, in junior high school at the time, saw my dad peeling an orange.  She looked at him in shock and awe and said, “You can peel those like cuties??” My dad burst out laughing at what may have been the most embarrassing moment of ignorance uttered. Upon further realization, it turns out whenever she had eaten oranges it was always because my mother had cut them up for her.  It became a story of not only the sheer dumbest statement my very smart sister has ever said, but also this sign of innocence and testament to my mother’s service and love in even little things.  Because of this story, I wanted to show the process of peeling an orange.  I decided to take the statements from “Ode to an Orange” by Larry Woiwode that talked about parents. 

This was a new form of media for me.  It would have been a lot easier to take the picture of just the orange, but there was something important for me about including my hands in the picture.  I felt like it made it more personable and like I was part of the telling of the story.  Because of this, it made taking the pictures a little trickier, and I had to figure out how to set a timer. I also had to go through the process of finding which tool or phone application would allow me to turn the pictures into a stop motion video.

            The process of peeling is something that has always intrigued me.  Pulling back layers to reveal more is something I think we all go through the more we interact and get to know people. I love this analogy and really wanted to showcase it within my video. As each piece is peeled back, I want to show how something is gained by having a new word appear. Perhaps it can pull the viewer in and create as much wonder as my somehow 14-year-old sister seeing my dad peel an orange for the first time.

Overall, creating this video made me think about my family, oranges, words, and media in new ways.  It made me realize that one topic can inspire so many individual stories and so much creativity.  In a classroom this reminded me of how we can use texts to spark students and let them discover their own process of creating. We can also introduce them to a variety of mediums that they can use and become literate at. In one of my teaching English classes, each day started with our teacher reading a children’s book and then us freewriting.  You could see so much variety in people’s free writes.  This project reminded me of this as it was fairly open, but we used “Ode to an Orange” as the starting point.  It would be cool if I could start out a theatre class similar to the children’s book/free write journal time, but have it be some sort of media that then they get 10 minutes to create something off of.