NINE! Ten! 13!!

I really liked the idea of taking something that you have previously written about and turning it into a poem. I feel like poetry tends to be something very difficult to get started with. I know I always had trouble coming up with something to write about whenever we had to write poetry in school. I thought it was very creative to write about something like the noise that overalls make in the dryer. I thought she made a really good point about how poetry does not have to be about something deep and profound. It is way too hard to write a poem that encompasses "all of nature" as she said in the book. To me, writing a poem about a very simple, every day thing like the washer/dryer is much more appealing and much more realistic.
Chapter 10 kind of got on my nerves. Obviously I don't know this author, and I do feel like she has a lot of good ideas, but I felt like she just kept insisting that her ways and methods are vital to a classroom and that the way she does it is the best way but people just aren't doing it. I understand why it's good and I don't mean to say that I wouldn't like having a writer's workshop in my classroom, but this just seems like a very extreme version of it. Maybe I'm totally wrong about that - I've never really heard or thought much about a writer's workshop before so maybe this really would be the way it was, but it seems really intense to me.
I don't understand what a focus lesson is.