Oy, My Brain

So, after I posted last night, I was brushing my teeth, thinking about what I wrote, and it occurred to me that part of the problem comes when I assign a grade to an exercise. Exercise is practice, and shouldn't we grade student work that is supposed to show mastery? Granted, the Letters About Literature assignment might have led up to mastery of certain things (thankfully, for many students, it did), but if a writer is not engaged in the topic, is it fair to expect mastery? What message does that send to a struggling writer, other than, here's another assignment you didn't like and didn't do well on, either. Research shows that it is best to teach students writing skills in a meaningful context, like when they're working on something they want to write. Given that no assignment is ever going to appeal to everyone, what's an English teacher to do? When it comes down to it, I don't care if my students can write a good Letter About Literature, I want them to be able to write a good anything.

I'll keep thinking about it.

Letters About Literature

My students have participated in this contest every year for the last three. The premise is interesting: kids are supposed to write a letter to an author explaining how a particular book changed them or their view of the world. Although this task might seem deceptively simple, the sponsors of the contest, the Library of Congress and Target, take pains in their instructional materials to emphasize that students must "correspond don't compliment" and "synthesize don't summarize." These higher order thinking skills can be tough for my sixth graders, but they are by no means impossible, so the assignment turns out to be a just-right challenge-- one that can be done well with enough preparation, work, and support.

The problem lies in the fact that these letters are supposed to be authentic and heartfelt, written by the students in acknowledgment of a significant impact the author's work has had on them. Quite honestly, not every eleven year old has experienced such a profound connection with a book. What then, English teacher? Do you disparage these children as shallow and chalk it up to weak parenting, too much TV, and video games? Do you release them from even trying because they're just not feelin' it?

It's been a tough call for me, but this year I asked all my students to approach the assignment as a writing exercise-- they had to go through the steps to produce a letter, but no one was required to send it unless they wanted to. As I've written before, this year my students are awfully compliant, and so most of them humored their wacky teacher and unquestioningly went through the process: reading models, completing mini-lessons, and then composing, revising, and editing draft after draft of their letters, until today, the day before the deadline, nearly half of them decided to enter the contest. And most of the letters were pretty good, too.

So, I have a stack of letters to grade this weekend, and when I do, I'm going to take a good look at the ones that are not successful to try and figure out how and why the "writing exercise" failed for those writers, because this kind of whole class assignment is exactly the kind of thing that I think undermines my workshop, often at the expense of struggling writers.

Giving Gifts

Obviously my students don't draw names for a holiday gift exchange, but last year we did gifts of writing using the Secret Santa concept. It was voluntary for students to participate, and everybody who wanted to do it filled out questionnaires with information about themselves. Then we folded those up and drew out of a bag to see who would be the recipient of our gift of writing. The parameters were broad-- it could be a piece of any genre and it could be written about the person or for the person. I thought it would be fun for the kids if I drew a name in each class, too.

It ended up being a nice activity, one that allowed the students to apply many of the writing lessons we'd learned. Most kids wrote a free verse poem about the person whose name they'd drawn, and I did, too, but some wrote letters to them and others composed pieces for them-- poems or short stories or cartoons that they hoped the person receiving the gift would enjoy. At the end, when the writing was done, we created companion wordles to give along with our gift.

I still have my five gifts of writing, and it was successful enough that I'm getting ready to do it again next week. I've struggled a little bit with the timing, though. We could do this activity any time, and it might be a good end of the year ritual, but this is a season of giving in the culture in which we all live, and I think it's okay to participate in that, too.

I think so, but I'm not sure.

Season's Greetings

When I was a little girl, every year in school we drew names for Pollyanna gifts. There was always a price limit like one or two dollars, and kids would bring the wrapped presents in and put them under the classroom tree. We opened them during the Christmas party, and I always remember being disappointed because I never, ever got a Lifesaver book. It wasn't even that I liked Lifesavers that much (with the exception of butter rum... now those were really good), but the book was so cool, and it was something my parents would never buy for me.

Remarkably, all of this took place in a public school, way before the phrase "politically correct" was ever dreamt of. Nowadays, in the diverse school I work in, some of us don't even think the secretaries in the office should construct their annual "holiday" display, even if it only consists of empty boxes wrapped in winter-themed paper surrounded by colored lights. We know what they're trying to say. And this afternoon, as I listened to the winter concert, I wondered how Santa and Silent Night could possibly be appropriate, even at this Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

For 'Cause

It's super-duper hard to hold on to a student-centered focus. That's why I moved away from the workshop back then. It takes a tough combination of confidence and humility-- it's hard to have the humility to step out of the way and let the students learn, and so any teacher who does that is constantly second-guessing herself, trying to find a balance between direct instruction and student practice. From the outside, such an approach doesn't always seem "rigorous" enough, and since many people equate rigor with value, it takes confidence to stand behind this philosophy.

For all those reasons, it can be kind of lonely, too.

The Slippery Slope

Sixteen years and a couple of months ago, I got my first teaching job. My assignment was to teach four one-hour English classes of 25 sixth graders each. I had finished my M.Ed. the December before and had spent the spring substitute teaching. I was ready for my own class. My training, as far as teaching literacy skills, had been primarily whole language. When I took my language arts methods class in graduate school, the notion of whole language was entirely new to me. I hadn’t thought about how kids learn to read and write since I had been in elementary school 20 years before.

In my mind, the essence of whole language was that you didn’t tell the students what to do, you gave them opportunities to acquire the skills of reading and writing on their own. This was a radical concept for a product of basal readers and grammar work sheets (which I loved, by the way). But the notion of students engaged in readers and writers workshops, practicing the skills of reading and writing on books and topics of their choice was enthralling to me. The vision of a classroom that was a community of readers and writers resonated deeply, and I knew that I wanted to create such a place and spend my time there.

So I did. The first year I taught was the first year of a new basal reading program adoption. The reading specialist proudly presented me with 125 brand new textbooks that I knew I didn’t intend to use. She was visibly shaken when I told her so.

“Here are your vocabulary books,” she offered.

“I don’t need them,” I replied.

“You should probably take them anyway,” she pushed in a soft drawl that almost covered her dismay.

The next day I had a visit from the county language arts supervisor. “What is your plan for the year?” she asked. I spoke passionately and at length, describing the program I envisioned; I showed her my collection of trade books, the area I set up for journals and writing supplies, the reading log I would use, my “State of the Class” binder, my bulletin board with publication opportunities. I also mentioned the resistance I felt from the reading specialist and other experienced teachers in the building. “I think you should do it,” she said. “You can’t hurt the kids if you do what you believe is right, and you clearly believe this is right.”

I took her advice and ran my class in pure workshop form. Students read and wrote on topics and in genres entirely of their choice. I experimented with ways to keep track of their work and ways to hold them accountable for their reading and writing. Together, we published a newspaper, had a voluntary essay-writing seminar, and wrote fan letters. Individually, my students kept writers journals, and wrote poetry, fiction, letters, essays, graphic novels, and more. They were published in the newspaper; they entered and won contests, and submitted their writing to journals. I read their writing and taught mini-lessons to address their needs.

At that time we had the "Literacy Passport" exam at sixth grade which tested reading, writing, and math. 100 students took it. A third were on free and reduced lunch. A quarter spoke English as a second language. Thirty percent were white, thirty percent Black, thirty percent Latino, and ten percent Asian. Of the hundred who took it, 99 passed the writing, and 97 passed the reading. I didn't know anything about analyzing test data back then, but now, 15 years later, I understand how extraordinary those results were.

So, you would think I would continue with my program exactly as I constructed it, year after year, tweaking the paper work and the mini lessons to more accurately keep track of and assist my students’ progress, right? Wrong. Each year my writing workshop became more adulterated, literally. I moved, gradually, from a student-centered approach to an adult-directed class. My students still did a lot of writing, but I assigned much more of it. Why?

Moderation

We were at dinner at some friends' last night, and the subject of my blog came up. Our host expressed some interest in reading these "reports from the trenches" of public education. He is a parent in our district, and his wife is a teacher at my school, and as the evening went on, we touched on a wide range of education and school-related topics, for example engagement vs. rigor-- why is there a perception that they are exclusive? Another was should all administrators have a teaching license, and should they be required to teach at least one class? We also talked about heterosexual privilege, and later "liberal" white parents who won't send their children to diverse schools. Several times throughout the night, he looked at me and said, "I feel a blog post coming!" We laughed, but he was right, those are all good topics. The only problem was that we stayed up talking until 2:30 A.M. and I've spent my day foggy-headed, resting and recovering, not writing. I feel lucky that there was a blog post at all today.