Step 1: Why do I want to write?

Why do I want to write? Writing helps me express myself. My thoughts, my emotions, my beliefs. But not just that. Writing goes beyond to show what we want to communicate, share with the rest of the people. And share useful information that could be useful to people’s lives.

나는 왜 쓰고 싶은가? 소통하고 싶다. 대학과 대학원때 글을 쓰는 것을 즐겼기 때문에 특히나 대학때 영문학을 공부하면서 글을 쓰는 고통을 느끼면서도 글을 쓰는 행복 때문에 공부를 끝까지 잘 마쳤을 수도 있을것같다.

Step 2: 5 senses imagery writing

I took on a walk with my mom yesterday to the park near by our house in our neighborhood. We took our dog, Mocha with us on the car and we headed out to the park we go to every afternoon to walk our dog. They say walking helps you organize your thoughts and is a useful recreational activity. There are couples in the park, family walking together, people jogging with beads of sweat rolling down their face. There are colorful shades of leaves in the park arranged by people with newly grown and planted plants. Some people are sitting near the gate talking to one another. The gate closes at 7pm and hence we have about an hour to take a stroll around the park several laps. As breeze passes by, we encounter people along our way. Some pass by us, while other we pass by some of them.

Step 3: One sensory detail

These days, I have my laptop playing various educational talks about reading and people who have been able to achieve their own success in their lives. Voices of various people would be playing in the background as I am reading, or solving IB and the voices of these people give me comforting motivation to work my assignment for Teach-Now for the week, or anything else I might have for the week. Some of them are full of self-conviction and sense of motivation in their maneuver of voice, and others provide conviction that are comforting and contagious, bringing about sense of energy and passion in my own life as well.

Step 4: Unconscious Writing

These days, I am engaged in self-learning as I am spending time to develop myself. And I have been able to encounter many self-learners and you tubers online who have been reading, writing and developing their contents to produce it online in an online platform. I have been listening to these videos, and reading about these people from time to time while tutoring students from international schools here in Myanmar, and now that schools have closed and switched to online classes, I have had many of the private tutoring cancelled as well and have been spending time preparing IB English exams, reading, and reading about other scholars in the field of education and how they have come to develop their own individual contents on education in their respective fields. And finding books and online videos about their expertise, and their process of developing and making expertise have been powerful tools that have enlarged and transformed my thinking in many ways.

Step 5: Writing about one’s own day

It was about a week ago, when I spent time in the morning reading Millionaire’s Messenger, blogging about some of the insights I had about the book on my Educontents blog. After which, I went to tutor a student in Crystal and the student needed help with atomic number and mass for the day, and so we had a short lecture about periodic table and chemistry for the day. After tutoring, my parents and I went to get acupuncture from a family friend and we were able to talk shortly before going out for dinner for dad’s birthday for the day. We were able to enjoy Thai Food from Nara and we were happy to celebrate his birthday. We decided by the end of the day that I will continue braces here in Myanmar, as flights have been cancelled by the spread of coronavirus worldwide and hence we had to communicate with the dentist in Korea about how we were to communicate with the local dentist about continuation of the dentistry process.

Step 6: Memo about a book (+Your Thoughts)

Leadership: In Turbulent Times

I was able to encounter this book through a book review that the people in internet platform, Changeground were reviewing. And I was able to get this book from kyobobooks and I found the beginning of the book to be essentially absorbing. Lincoln, while growing up, found every way to get access to the books around his neighborhood. Sometimes he would walk miles to walk to the nearby library where he could get access to the books, and there were times when his dad had given him great scolding for reading books and not working in the farm. Despite these challenges, he had immersed himself into reading which became a great source for the skillful organization and leadership he executed and showed in his political career, leading the whole country of US and also freeing the country from slavery. Bill Gates, Edison and many other leaders and trailblazers of their fields have read massive amount of books, and have been avid readers, as they have found massive amount of knowledge, skill and wisdom from the books they have immersed themselves in.

Step 7: (Collecting) Writing about a moving/striking line

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” 
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Though we think we are moving ahead in time, and we are always moving into the future, we underestimate the significance of our past, how influential our past is of the making of the present. We may be in many ways influenced by our past, or perhaps even moving into the past at times as is suggested by many authors in various poems. Gatsby himself has been greatly influenced by his past, his dreams and aspirations influenced by Daisy and his relationship with Daisy – the dream depicted in the form of green light at the end of the book as well. Hence, his ambitious dreams was not independent on its own, but influenced and challenged into creation by his encounters and interactions with Daisy and his desires to impress and get hold of her.

Step 8: Poem Analysis

‘Out, Out—’

BY ROBERT FROSTThe buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was, 
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart— 
He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it. 
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

Out, Out is a poem by Robert Frost with historical, religious and literary allusion to it. The title, Out Out has been inspired by the line in Macbeth where the blowing out candle is portrayed as a metaphor of life going out. Hence is portrayed the ephemeral nature of life. Also, there is the religious allusion of the last supper, suggesting the irony of the sister calling out for supper would have been in retrospect the last supper the boy would have had. And lastly, but most importantly, the poem is a historical allusion to World War II where many of the young men of United States had to enlist in the army while grandeur and honor of fighting in the war were upheld as virtuous and courageous values among young men. The tragedy of war in the deaths of many young men, and the reality of adults turning their heads away from the scene would have been central themes that Frost would have wanted to portray in Out, Out.