Confronting My Own Bias

A week after presenting at a Pennsylvania Writing & Literature Project graduate course, Grammar Matters, I received an envelope chock-full of thank you notes from the participants in the mail. Among the cards, one teacher wrote, "Thank you for helping me confront my own bias about grading."

That statement, confronting my own bias, energizes me.

Not that the note in any way, shape, or form validates any sense of right and wrong or who has the answers and who does not. To the contrary, it reminds me that I am and will forever be in that place as well--confronting my own bias. In other words, growing.

In ten years I will be able to see through the lens of further experience and exposure to mentors--and that kind of growth is invigorating. I am not afraid of knowing that I can, will, and should grow--even though I am twenty years in to the profession--actually, especially since I am twenty years into the profession.

I was reluctant to confront my own bias for far too many years. I did not reflect, read, or write. I simply taught. And I believed I was doing a good job. I wanted to do a good job. My intentions were sincere and from a good place. However, in retrospect, how paralyzing (even just reconsidering) that  former mindset feels now. I was paralyzed within my own bias and I could not recognize it.

Side note: that bias includes more than grading. I have carried biases in writing, grammar, assessment, classroom management, reading, et al. Much of my bias came from not only how I was taught but also how I came to cope and learn.

A team of mentors helped me confront my bias. Donald Graves, one of those important mentors, never met me. But I meet him again and again through his writing. After reading the thank you notes today, I pulled out Writing: Teachers & Children at Work to read from Graves's valuable insights again.

What strikes me today in Writing: Teachers & Children at Work is that Graves tells us children want to write--even on the first day of school:

"Children want to write. They want to write the first day they attend school. This is no accident. Before they went to school they marked up walls, pavements, newspapers with crayons, chalk, pens or pencils...anything that makes a mark. The child's marks say, 'I am.'" (3)

This is the beauty of Graves in my world. He writes so many lines--let alone passages--which serve as a flashpoint--an invitation--for me to confront my own bias.

"We have all heard the groan in the classrooms, 'Do I have to copy it over?' This is the popular understanding of revision. Put a good manicure on a corpse. (4)"

We could go on and discuss Graves--and I hope I spend the rest of my career (and life) doing just that with colleagues (new and familiar). But here, today, I just want to point out that when I read Graves I not only find compelling statements, but also I find an educator who displayed humility and curiosity. take that lesson to heart. 

Humility.

I try to practice humility just as much as I try to practice his concrete teaching points on writing and children. Humility is not always easy, but it is a conscious choice. Graves knew he wasn't perfect, and he embraced the energy of humility (scary! thrilling!) in his life's work. Writing and children invited him to confront his own biases and therein made him feel alive in his work. 

When people or experiences or places make us feel alive, we fall in love.

And so I appreciate the teacher who took the time to write to me in a note, "Thank you for helping me confront my own bias about grading." I imagine that kind of challenge made him feel alive and energized for September.

I am right there with him. Thank you, Jim. Have a wonderful year!

I am wondering what other experiences teachers have had which helped them feel alive, confront their own bias, or even fall in love with the craft of teaching and/or writing...

When Students Raise YOU up

Little gems like these arise from time to time--this student has no idea how much this reinvigorates me as a teacher. It makes me want to keep learning, keep getting better, and to keep writing myself.

It reaffirms the shared inspirations with the NWP and everything we read and discuss together. It underscore Fletcher, Atwell, Murray, Graves, Eood Ray, Bomer (and Bomer!)...and the list goes on.

In honor of all that is good about teaching writing, I am sharing something written yesterday by one of my 8th grade students on their final exam:


"This year in CW [creative writing] might have been one of my better years in English. I like how we weren't strapped down to worksheets and projects of research. I appreciated your kindness and willingness to let students discuss their writing with you. I also appreciate the amount of opportunities you gave us as students to be able to send our work out for publication. I think I grew as a person and a writer because you didn't constantly tell me or other students what was wrong with our writing but you told us what we could do to fix it and you showed us ways to bend the rules. I think the things learned and discussed in class this year will stick for many years to come. If not, I'm sure something will happen and it will all come crashing in like waves. It will all surround me and I won't be able to forget it."

Money, Wedges, and Literacy: What the Common Core Missed

Abstract

"The Common Core" distracts educators away from a pressing need: training in digital literacy.  Access to technology is access to power.  Without training and resources education continues to drive a larger wedge between the haves and have-nots.  With, at best, a casual mention of digital literacy, the Common Core ensures only one thing—as the Digital Renaissance evolves we are all at risk of being left behind.

What the Common Core Missed

As Digital Literacy provides access to information—and access to power—this Digital Renaissance exposes the haves and the have-nots in our country.   While education must always remain pedagogy-driven, society’s immersion in technology can not be ignored by educators.  Without the correct training and focus on a Common Core built on the needs of this society, teachers will no longer be able to help students unlock their futures.

Teachers need immersion and training in technology in order that students may have immersion and training in technology.  Technology passes books as the access point to information and power.  In a 2008 PEW study, researchers learned that the primary source for research done at or for school is the internet: 94% of teens use the internet at least occasionally to do research for school and nearly half (48%) report doing so once a week or more often.  Without a revised Common Core, we are in danger of contributing to an even greater divide of haves and have nots—and it isn’t all about having the money to supply the technology.  Permitting a culture of teachers of haves and have-nots is my greater fear—those who have the comfort, experience, and training to immerse themselves and their classes in digital literacy and those who simply have not.

Technology is largely taught in isolation.  Computer rooms grow in our schools while other classrooms are lucky to house one or two computers.  This Sex Edification of technology contributes to an educator’s fear or resistance.  Rather than synthesize digital tools with real-world applications and core curriculum, the digital tools sit on tables like $1,000 encyclopedias or typewriters.  Just like Sex Ed, we tend to believe "someone else will teach it" and do so in isolation.

The fact is, we are online.  We are digital readers.  We are digital writers. All roads intersect and we have redefined Digital Reality with people.  Within the last decade Digital Reality shifted from a game played on an LED battlefield to a way of life.  In many ways, we live every moment of our lives in a digital reality because the world is making more land—a digital landscape.  Yet instead of training educators, young and old, to engage inspiration and inventiveness, American politics burns the digital landscape right from under our feet, almost as fast as it can be created, with the oversights of the Common Core.

The axiom good writing is good writing will never be displaced.  Whether we teach with chalk, white board markers, or Smartboards (which some will consider outdated by the way), the fundamental truths of reading, writing, and arithmetic remain among the few constants in education, yet we stand on the frontier of a Digital Revolution and the national plan is fragmented and weak...actually, there is no plan. With only a too casual yawn and nod at technology, the Common Core nudges educators to rewrite curriculum built on international testing standards.

We can’t just leave using technology and digital literacy to the whim of individual teachers—yet this is what the Common Core establishes.

Common Core Oversight #1: No specific mention or acknowledgment of digital literacy

Without the appropriate level of leadership and training, computer labs can best be labeled technology dumps as educators are left to decide for themselves—depending on their school’s budget and climate—how best to incorporate technology in the classroom.  For what we do and produce in our American classrooms, Underwoods, hardback encyclopedias, and tri-folds are currently just as effective as computers—given two classes, one with technology and one with typewriters, books, and cardboard, we would see little difference in the products between the classes.

Until there is a common training program and goal built on digital literacy, educators will continue to use new technology in old ways because the old ways are rooted in the financial soil of testing and achievement.  What message is reinforced when our schools receive Race to the Top funds and selective waivers from the No Child Left Behind requirements all in the name of carrying the torch for the Common Core?  What incentive exists to grow with the technology?  How will we ever expect educators to see new technology as anything other than a digital poster, encyclopedia, or way to type and print? 

In reality, we will fail our students when it comes to digital literacy and this new access to power.

Education is failing—we are failing to be led.  We are failing to be supported.  We are failing to be recognized for all that we achieve with technology in spite of the “you’ll figure it out” model.  Buttressed by the financial obligations of Achieve, Inc., the ACT, and the College Board,  the Common Core supports the testing business.  Who is in the business of supporting, leading, and recognizing educators? Who is in the business of supporting and leading technology use in education?  Educators.  I assure you, we will figure it out.  Yet, along the way, we fight district by district for what we need, to overcome the inequities from school to school, and only if we’re lucky and blessed some of us fight to bring American education into the Digital Renaissance.

Common Core Oversight #2: Reading

The Common Core does little to encourage adequate growth and progress of technology use in the K-5 Reading Plan.

Listing no formal digital reading expectations among its Foundational Skills, the Common Core mentions in its Reading Standards that students should analyze how writing is affected by different modes, particularly multimedia.  A modest, but promising start considering “multimedia” does not explicitly mean digital.  Multimedia can mean photography, a poster, a set of slides.  Depending on the whim, comfort, or training of the teacher, an informed exposure to digital reading may never occur for many students.

Additionally, and equally as distressing, in the Common Core Reading Plan, from the 6th through 8th grades, students are asked to compare and contrast different forms, including multimedia. Even if I imply “multimedia” as digital and online, it does not mean others teachers will—education outgrows that word on a daily basis. 

Digital reading for citizens and consumers in our society is a non-negotiable skill. It is a must-have. Perhaps this dearth of digital reading is a reflection of the comfort level that our Common Core designers have with the K-8 age range handling costly digital hardware.   Perhaps they have well-founded fears of elementary and middle school students seeing pornography or graphic violence on the internet.  Perhaps the focus in K-8 should be more on the skill of analysis than the digital vehicle through which the analysis occurs.  This is plausible until we consider the next phase in the Common Core progression.

Sadly, from 9th-12th grade there are no digital (or multimedia) reading expectations.  There are no expectations for students to interact with what they read digitally.  There are no expectations to instruct students in how to be a savvy digital reader and consumer.  None.  Zero.  Digital reading, disguised or misinterpreted as multimedia, ends at the 8^th grade.  In our Common Core, digital literacy may never develop for some of our students. 

Is this plan driven by pedagogy and the needs of an emerging societal shift?  Or is it the architecture of a financially asphyxiated team regarding education through test-colored lens?

Common Core Oversight #3: Writing

Heroically, the anchor standards for writing in the Common Core ask students from the fourth grade through high school graduation to “use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.”

The focus words are produce, publish, interact, and collaborate—no explicit mention of achieving these things digitally other than through use of the Internet.  While the Internet is one important acre of the emerging digital landscape it does not cover everything.  Suggesting Internet equals digital literacy is already an old-fashioned understanding of technology; I’m reminded of Rupert Murdoch sounding out of touch recently as he railed against Google as an Internet pirate.  An illustration of just how confused people in power can become; we so often mistake the size of someone’s bank account for the breadth of one’s knowledge.

Educators are forced to imply the word “digitally” within the expectations of the Common Core—but what happens when that is not implied?  The problem with the language in the Common Core is that “digital” is implicit and therefore this aspect of the Common Core is open to the vagaries of a teacher’s digital comfort level. 

For example, if I show my students a sample of an essay (on the internet), and then students brain storm ideas face to face while hunting for topic ideas (on the internet), then type a paper on a laptop while checking my requirements for the assignment on our school website (on the internet), then save the essay to the school server (on the internet) and print it wirelessly in order that I might tack their essays across the walls in my classroom, haven’t I then fulfilled the expectations of the Common Core: produce, publish, interact, and collaborate?  I included the internet and I can complete that assignment in less than a week.

Fundamentally, I’d hope the Common Core meant to express that our students also digitally produce, digitally publish, digitally interact, and digitally collaborate.  Embedded in what it means to be alive in 2012, much of the world communicates through digital means—if we leave these emerging digital tools to the next Angry Birds or just to keep in touch with family and friends then we lose—and you can point your fingers right at us, the American educators, because we will be working in a system which fails all of us.

It is not too late for American education to right itself and become active participants in the digital literacy renaissance.  We belittle the tools of technology when we do not actively reach to train our teachers and then our students to use them.  Otherwise, computers are little more than toys, typewriters, encyclopedias, or delivery systems for web-based supplemental tools such as Study Island (which provides little more than supplemental worksheets and activities on-line).  Technology in education often suffers beneath the yoke of simply pulling the same lessons built on the same expectations of tools-gone-by.

Why?  Because that is all we know—it’s what we were raised on.  A computer works like a typewriter, works like an encyclopedia, works like a tri-fold; therefore, that is all I’ll expect of it.

It is no longer enough to put computers in schools and roundly call it a success.  Educators need training in digital literacy, but that takes having a plan.  Currently, teacher training programs such as the National Writing Project are under the gun to have its funding eradicated.  If we ever really want to see our young people grow into creators and innovators, then we need teachers trained and constantly practicing and talking all aspects of the art of teaching—added to this is the digital component all teachers need training in digital literacy.  

We seem to be working backwards—the talk is that teacher training is a target of upcoming economic cuts and yet we roll out a Common Core entrenched in testing.  Write your Senators and Congressmen to take a long hard look at the Common Core and then at the digital landscape.  They won’t have to look far to see it—its inspiration is burning all around them.

Common Core Oversight #4: Assumption

Now there is a caveat for the Common Core—intended as merely a guide it assumes that districts can add and modify as they see fit.  This is a big assumption by our best and brightest.  Irrespective of neglect born from pedagogy or finance, we as educators can’t in good conscience leave this emerging and critical skill to the hope and discretion of “do as you see fit.”  Digital literacy skills are a must have for every child.  We can’t assume that it will get done.   We can’t assume that all kids have access to it at home—we have to demand training, resources, as well as the leadership.  We need to demand a better plan—we can measure training.  To the educational leadership, raise up your teachers, expect more—and arm them with the tools to do more.

Today, the Common Core leaves our young people digitally unarmed.  Students will file out of graduation and into a world milling and seething with technology…and we will have barely touched on it unless a rogue teacher exhibits the comfort and expertise to use it and teach with it.

The one thing that education should have going for it is technology—the depth and quality of our nation’s education should rise along with the continued evolution of technology.  We’re in the infant stages of a Digital Renaissance— and while our biggest and brightest sleep on this issue, we have a professional responsibility as educators to make ourselves digitally literate. 

I also hold the mirror up to myself.  We need to take the responsibility for the digital literacy that this generation will need to thrive and survive not only in the workplace, but in the family unit.  Digital literacy has infiltrated our television screens, our smart phones, and in our daily moment to moment communication with our family and friends—all of which sits in many of our pockets or bags.

Digital literacy is about more than recognizing the Twitter or Facebook icon at bottom of a commercial, it is bigger than the fear of graphic imagery that our young people could be exposed to on the internet.  You know they print pornography with paper and ink too, but that never stopped us from going to the library, bookstore, or handing out paper and pencil.  Avoid the luxury of excuses—make yourself more digitally literate.

Common Core Oversight #5: All Teachers Left Behind

Recently I wrote a grant for technology so that my students could be digital writers and readers more consistently and found myself presented with a concern that technology would replace pencil and paper.  The insinuation slanted technology more towards fun or idle time and pencil and paper as the emblem of diligence and getting our knuckles dirty with graphite.  Every adult in education is responsible for that perception.

Digital writing still requires that writers move through the recursive phases of planning, reflecting, drafting, and revising—the skill is still the skill, and, no, technology is not essential to the core of that skill, but we can't simply bring only traditional mindsets to current literacy practices.  The day is coming when reading and writing on paper will not be good enough in our world.  The definition and cultural concept of a textbook is about to be exploded by Apple and its competition.   Digital technology creates new skills and redefines old skills—life is about growth and change.  Depending on your perspective I suppose it is also about withering and dying…and being left behind.

I came across the anecdote that a group of teachers, instructed on some advancements to school email, learned students would also have their own school email accounts.  A concerned teacher questioned why we would give middle school kids this kind of access—how could we possibly trust them?  Can’t they abuse this?  What about if one kid cyber bullies another through the email we handed to them?  The teacher leading the group retorted, “Why would we ever trust them with pencil and paper?”

These concerns illustrate the boogeymen that can be conjured without the proper exposure and training to just what these tools are, what they can do, what they can’t do, and how they improve education and our collective quality of life.   It also demonstrates how far behind some of us are—eh, Rupert?

 If we allow the innovations of technology to serve merely as distractions or vehicles of our social lives then that is all we are going to get out of them.

Digital tools aren’t used in schools because they are cute or the latest thing or a vehicle to produce a sexier reproduction of a tried and true lesson, but they should be used because they, and only they, address the specific and unique skills emerging in today’s world. 

We underwhelm ourselves sometimes.

Politicians, parents, and educators need to share in a common core.  Our core should be built on the recognition that the digital age is here and it is a renaissance that we need to engage.  We can’t continue to be so casual about it.  We need to expect more of each other and become active members of the current Digital Renaissance in order that our students have a chance to grow into active creators and innovators who network professionally and socially as easily as they speak. 

If we want measurable results, train your teachers with an eye on the specific needs and evolution of society.  Being an adolescent in the early stages of the 21st century looks little like the early stages of the 20th century—when typewriters, the New England Primer, and paper flourished. 

You cannot teach what you have not made your own. You cannot inspire unless you too are inspired.  Quite frankly, the Common Core does little to inspire any of us, and in the end, may only serve to leave all us behind.

art by Sarah Louette

Book Review: True Notebooks

Conflicting thoughts collide as I set to review Mark Salzman's nonfiction True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall.  Among those thoughts, two rise as the most pronounced--this is a book about finding our humanity and it is a love letter to writing.

Salzman leads a writer's group in the Los Angeles Central Juvenile Hall for some of the most violent criminals in the early stages of the system--most have committed murder and are waiting to be tried as adults.

Filled with the simultaneous journeys off all of the adolescents who moved through his workshop, True Notebooks also provides a glimpse of the good people serving as advocates behind the scenes.  Remarkably, all involved recognize the importance of writing of in our lives.

Just as I, as a reader, grow attached to what an inmate has learned to express he is soon gone--gone from the book.  Gone.  Gone from the juvenile hall.  Gone.  Gone into the prison system where all acknowledge that they fall back into their hardened ways by necessity--in order to survive where they are going, some facts are indisputable.

Yet, what is never lost is what the writing experience, albeit too brief, shows each of these young people their humanity--and the possibilities of their humanity.  Through their own words we read what they have been trained to believe, their regrets, fears, hopes, and dreams.

Rough-hewn elegance meets street poetry, the writing produced by these prisoners does elicits many questions about how societies in general handles violent criminals.  However, this isn't a book set on debating the state of the justice system--when someone asks Salzman wouldn't he be better served teaching writing to troubled youth before they become criminals who committed murder we are offered the same response as when he is repeatedly asked by the inmates why he continues to show up to workshop with them: everyone needs to find their own humanity.

Never about stopping crime, Salzman's efforts demonstrate the power of writing, the power of compassion, and the many slices of reality offered to him through the writing of the inmates: 

Someone who made a big difference in my life was my partner.  Well, I should say my ex-partner, hate.  Hate was always there for me at night when I was all alone and the air-conditioning was on too high in my room.  Hate would keep me warm.  I should say he was like my father 'cause for the seven years that my father was gone, hate taught me how to speak, hate taught me how to love, and eventually hate taught me how to hate.  My best friend, my mother, my father, hate was all that.  Hate helped me grow, or was dat wrong?  I asked myself this question one day when I was lookin' into a six-by-nine mirror in my cell.  I was wearing somebody else's clothes, underwear, and socks full of holes.  Hate had left me to duel with misery and pain.  Thanks, hate.

Initially, I picked this book up because it is about writing and memoir--and as I read I saw it through the lens of being a teacher--and now, as I write this review, I've come to understand it through the lens of being a human being.

Highly recommended for teachers and human beings.

Resource Review: Save the Cat

After well over two dozen author chats via Skype in my classroom, one book continues to surface on the lips of the authors: Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need by Blake Snyder.

The first I heard of it, YA author Lizabeth Zindel responded to a question about how a writer can make a character likable.  Zindel references this book and explained that a character may be written to "save a cat" or perform an act of kindness, tenderness, selflessness that immediately renders him/her likable.

Most recently, YA author Irene Latham talked about building her novels through "beats"--a term she learned through Save the Cat.  Latham will write one line for each chapter or significant development in plot--each of those lines represents a beat because each serves a different purpose.  From there, she builds outward from each beat.

I read the book--through much of it Snyder offers a template for how many films are organized...or should be.

Without going into all twelve beats, the first several beats can be summed up as:

Act One - Thesis:
Where the audience sees the world before the adventure starts.
There is a sense that a "storm" is about to hit...things must change.

Catalyst Moment:
A life-changing moment occurs here, often disguised as bad news.
This is the first moment where something happens.

Debate:
The last chance for the hero to say that this is crazy.
Should I stay or should I go--it's dangerous out there, but what other choice do I have?


Each beat has its own chapter where Snyder explains what it is in depth and he often offers examples from contemporary film to help elucidate his point.

This book is a good tool for writers or, in my case for writing teachers, in that it provides clear examples of how writers plan.  You'd have to tease out Snyder's prescription if you are writing a novel--which Irene Latham must do. For instance, Snyder is so firm about the specific page numbers on which each beat must appear (the "catalyst moment" must appear on page 12 of a script) that everyone would be writing 100 page "novels."

More than the beats of organizing a piece, I found the book to be an interesting and a refreshing resource in that it very directly and distinctly presents some usable ideas and techniques.

August Klimt - artist

The Simple Truth about Writing

In response to the article Writing Lessons by Jay Mathews of the Washington Post:


I teach 8th grade, and at times I can’t help but think about myself when I was in 8th grade.  This is natural for most people; we tend to lean on our experiences as a student when we deal with the ups and downs of our own kids.

Sometimes a colleague may ask the group in the faculty lunchroom, “which of these 8th graders were you most like?”  I used to have fun with that question, but I now have an answer for the entirety of the rest of my teaching career: none.

I was like none.

If we include technology (email, chat, texting, et al.), the students I teach today write more than I ever did at their age.  Recent research by the National Assessment of Education Progress indicates that while most students have mastered the basics of writing, they can not write well.

The research by the NEAP specifically states that few students are able to produce meaningful writing which engages a reader with any precise, engaging, or coherent prose.

Today, young people compose writing with their thumbs at a blinding rate of speed and a highly skilled aptitude on an area of screen the size of a few postage stamps.  When I was in 8th grade, I either held a pencil or I used a typewriter.

Today's students truncate words to their benefit, and sometimes for humor.  They use symbol and code to communicate efficiently.  When I truncated words I had to learn how to use white-out and then retype over the dried white-out.

My high school typing instructor, Brother Joe Mulholland, seeing my students use their thumbs to type, would have shuddered in his white cassock.  Don't kids know what pica and elite are anymore?  Don't they know the five-paragraph essay?

I was, indeed, like none.

Since social networking saturated the free-time of young people in the mid-2000s, our students have
written more collectively than young people ever did in the history of mankind.  When I typed at home, there as no immediate audience.

Today, when students write on their personal devices they do so to an active and immediate audience.
Yet, few, adolescent or adult, call this act writing.

There is a disconnect between what our students are writing online and what they are able to produce on paper.  The NEAP data explicitly states that when students are asked to write on paper most produce rudimentary and uninteresting ideas.  Their writing satisfies only the basic skills most associate with their adolescent writing experience—grammar and structure.  It underscores what our nation demands, believes, and emphasizes: when classroom instruction is hammering the kids on grammar and structure, great teaching is occurring.

Because that is what most people remember from their own experiences.

Furthermore, mom and dad are less likely to raise a stink with the current English teacher if they see an abundance of errors noted on their child’s essay.  They see evidence of correction, it likely resembles their childhood experience; therefore, it must be right.

Today’s student has been thrust into a society where strong writing is implicit in order to work towards a successful and abundant life.  To borrow from Troy Hicks, adolescents are natives to digital writing and adults are the immigrants.  While young people may not exactly be native to digital writing they are certainly "tech comfy."  They were and are being born into this nano-age.  Yet, we are the ones teaching.

The digital immigrants are in charge. 

If we do not act, we will miss out on a tremendous opportunity to help our young people develop an already critical skill on which new premiums and new criticisms have been placed.

There does not need to be a disconnect between the writing for technology and writing as a basic and necessary social and professional skill.  Part of the lag in our nation's writing is that professional development programs generated by districts or county intermediate units rarely invite teachers to see themselves as writers--until they meet the National Writing Project.

It took me 15 professional years to find the NWP.  I'd always dabbled as a writer, but it took me 15 professional years to see myself as a writer.

Student teachers and student observers come into my English classroom from all of our local universities without any sense of themselves as a writer.  I've asked them.  And I've asked them if they have ever had any instruction through the National Writing Project--I have yet to meet one.  I know many are out there--I've met parents of my students just this year who are also Fellows in the NWP.

They came to be Fellows only after 10 or more years of establishing a teaching career.

It isn't their fault.  After all, they are (we are) teaching what we have been taught, following the wishes of our community and administrative leaders, and we are also drawing back on our own experiences in the classroom as students.

What's worse, having secured a teaching position, many English teachers typically receive little instruction in how to teach writing—and by that I do mean to stress and repeat that the ability to correct grammar and usage does not in and of itself lead to any instruction on writing.

Additionally, few teachers outside of our English departments receive any instruction on writing at all, let alone receive encouragement to be a writer and see themselves as a writer.

The simple truth is, in many schools, writing is generally assigned to the students by teachers who do not see themselves as writers because they do not write themselves. As such, writing is not a shared experience.  Writing is not produced for authentic audiences and for authentic purposes.

With a wealth of research and technology around us, many are still using the traditional techniques used on them.  We are back in typing class, fingers curled, typing to no one together.  Students are cringing at their returned papers; the red slashes symbols of their failure and inadequacies...as editors.

We've made ourselves judges of writing.  Subsequently, the students are trying to please to gain the prize of an A...or a 6 on a rubric. Their voices stripped down to following state guidelines, conventions, and a teacher's taste, they produce writing which is technically acceptable but says nothing.

When we write with our students and share our imperfect drafts we elevate the significance of the very act of the process of writing.  We move away from judge and closer to mentor.  And this act of the mentor in the classroom writing alongside of them—this elevation of the act of writing in a student's eyes—should not exist just inside the English teacher’s classroom.

When colleagues outside of the English classrooms suggest that they can’t teach writing in their classes, they say so out of fear.  Without the proper knowledge of knowing how to root out errors they believe, indirectly, that writing serves little purpose in their classes beyond providing an answer to a specific question. Some may not feel qualified.  Some may defend themselves and suggest that they already assign some writing.

What an ugly word when it comes to writing—assign.

What an ugly perception of our role—rooting out errors. 

We are to blame for that stifling language and perception.

We can begin to resuscitate writing by changing the way we all see writing: teaching writing is teaching thinking.  

Some of the seminal research in this area has been widely documented and tested.  In A Writer Teaches Writing, Donald Murrary observes the common and easily made mistakes by well-intentioned educators:

Meaning is not thought up and then written down.  The act of writing is an act of thought. [Teachers] give writing assignments based on the assumption that  writing begins after thinking is concluded, and they respond to those assignments as if the etiquette of language were more important than the thinking represented by language. (3) 

We are also to blame, as Tom Romano suggests, for the dinner party commentary we are all doomed to experience: “You’re an English teacher?  Oh—I should mind my grammar.”

We are, indeed, to blame for that language and that perception.  That is our legacy as English teachers as it currently stands. I have 17 years in the profession and that is a legacy I am not comfortable with.

We can all learn from and apply the research and inquiry by the NWP, the NCTE, the NEAP, and separate research, observation, and studies published by education pioneers: Don Murray, Ralph Fletcher, Nancy Atwell, Peter Elbow, Tom Romano, Lucy Calkins, Randy Bomer, Katie Wood Ray and many others.

We are too good, too talented, and there is too much accessible information available for us (especially through technology) not to rethink what we do when it comes to teaching writing. 

Teachers involved with the NWP are some of the most supportive and humble people I know.   Through this program, the opportunity is there for us to change the game.  When teachers are writers then they are using writing as active thinkers.  When our kids see writing as an opportunity to think and develop their unique voices, this changes the game.

It would be absurd to send your child to a piano teacher who does not play—even socially.  It is a waste of your dollar to sign your child up for batting lessons, soccer lessons, or dance lessons from someone who does not understand the first-hand struggle of improving in those pursuits.  One of the beauties about writing (and there are many) is it does not wear out your joints, it does not cause you to have a bad back—you can do it until you die.

The only thing stopping us is us…and time.  I’m proposing that we make that time in our profession.

Once teachers believe that they are writers and do it, the writing produced from our students will grow and improve.  Until that happens writing will not improve in our schools—we are doomed to repeat what we already do and know--the things we are already comfortable with because they were done to us.

Furthermore, unless it is important to us then this change will never get done.

At the rehearsal dinner for a close friend, his father lifted his glass high in a toast to the room and then looked at his son and offered his advice for all to hear: “Love is not what you say, it is what you do.”

Similarly, writing is not what we say, it is what we do.  Or should do.

We have to be the model of the change we desire--nothing is simpler, nothing is truer.

If you currently do not write regularly now, then write.  Take the journey again.  Write in a journal in the morning before school.  Write during class with your students.  Explore your own thoughts or confusion regarding a particular general, artist, or current event.  Write about math.  Write about science.  What about life.  Write not to be judged, but to model the process of creating precise, engaging, and coherent prose which our students can not produce.

If we are not a part of the solution then we are a part of the recurring problem; therefore, we must write.  

In the article on the student by the NAEP, The neglected “R”: The need for a writing revolution, part of the recommendation is for students to write every day in an environment fostered by teachers who have been offered support and professional development in order to “see themselves as writers—to experience the power and satisfaction of writing as a means of learning and self-expression.”

This is your staff development.  Ask for it; demand it.  We must do it first so that we can experience the age when all teachers in all subjects write and use writing with their students.

We must lead that evolution.  We can’t teach what we don’t know.  And if we do not write then we do not know writing.

We must write.

If you have not taken part in a NWP summer workshop then find one in your area and take one.  Build a professional library of writing texts in your home or school and set your mind to the fact that if you teach, then you should also write.

We must lead the evolution.  Writing is one of the few remaining common filters of thinking, discovery, and being human.  As Randy Bomer wrote in Time for Meaning:

Once I have identified myself as a writer, even if writing still scares me to death, I have located writing not as some school activity that is outside me, but as a part of my life, for better or worse, and that gives me the hope of being alive to change and growth. (22)

We can not continue to pass on the opportunity to use something so profound and powerful. Whether it is writing about scientific inquiry, or mathematical induction, or your thoughts on an upcoming family decision, writing shows us our humanity. 

Write.  Decades of research, study, and observation cannot implement itself.




References

Bomer, Randy. Time for meaning: crafting literate lives in middle and high school. BoyntonCook, 1995. Print.

Gallagher, Kelly. Teaching Adolescent Writers. Stenhouse Pub, 2006. Print. 

Hicks, Troy. The Digital Writing Workshop. Heinemann Educational Books, 2009. Print. 

Murray, Donald. A writer teaches writing. Houghton Mifflin College Div, 1985. Print.

National
 Commission
on 
Writing 
for
 America's
 Families,
 Schools 
and 
Colleges.
 (2003). 
The
neglected
“R”:
 The
 need 
for 
a
 writing 
revolution.


Romano, Tom. Clearing the way: working with teenage writers. BoyntonCook, 1987. Print.

This I Believe

tudents are submitting essays and podcasts today to our classroom wiki for This I Believe. We will be submitting both to the This I Believe website in the hopes that some may be selected for publishing.

The following is my This I Believe essay which I wrote alongside of my students:


I believe in the two million pennies in my mother’s pocket. She conjures love and karma with them.

The secret has been that my mother reaches her hand into her pocket and shares every penny—whatever anyone needs, the pennies are theirs--and while raising me as a single mother she worked job after job after job to fight to secure every last penny she could.

We lived in the same row house in Philadelphia in which she was raised, and we shared meals, daily, with the aunts and uncles and cousins who also lived on that same street.

In fact, we shared in so many meals together with family that it was a small treat to eat some meals, just the two of us, at our modest kitchen table.

My mom stored some pennies in a petite white and blue porcelain jar on a windowsill. Standing on my toes, I used to peer inside when she wasn’t around to see how many pennies might be in there.

Working a regular job during the week and part-time jobs on some weekends didn’t leave a lot of time for herself. Instead, with that time, she chose to offer me the world on just a penny.

She took me to my first art classes at the Fleischer School of Art, reached into her pocket and offered me pastels, charcoal, colored pencils, paint, and paper—again and again and again. My enthusiasm wandered and I stopped taking the lessons...yet a love of art was born in me.

She slid a guitar out of that pocket, and acquired an instructor for me--whom I impatiently quit.

She showed me a newspaper ad for ice hockey and then poured enough from her pocket onto the counter to equip me—picking me up right after her shift at work was done twice a week, we’d drive an hour to and from Philadelphia just so I could skate for the first time.

I’d never skated before--yet she used what she had to make it happen...and patiently watched me shuffle around the ice in my equipment, leaning on my stick to keep me upright, and continued to nudge and drive me along until I could skate, could play, could compete.

Alone, I’d stand by the door each night we had hockey, already dressed in my hockey gear except for skates, gloves and helmet, and wedged myself into the passenger seat and often acted like a child—I complained that she was late, and we were going to be late.

It was a dark winter in 1979, a gas crisis crippled America—every penny counted for everyone. Yet she continued to count every last one for me and others.

Mom placed me and a cousin safely in her pocket of pennies and carried us to Disney World later that spring for nothing less than magic and love—she has been there many times since, upwards of 7 or 8 trips. While I haven’t been back with her, I like remembering that I was there with her during her first trip when she simply fell under its charming spell and has never awakened from it since.

Mom has tugged years of diapers from that pocket of two million pennies for that same Disney World cousin’s infant—single mom sharing pennies with another single mom.

Mom donates to the SPCA, to Susan G. Komen, and many other organization, yet still is happiest working for pennies. Don’t get me wrong, she’s held lucrative jobs, but she laughs and smiles answering phones one day a week at the salon my cousin works at as a stylist; she beamed this past weekend when she shared that she made fifteen dollars teaching childrens Zumba at the YMCA.

While I take great lessons from my mother’s infinite generosity and making the most out of what she has, I also take note that there is karma—just this month she has won her fourth trip from Regis & Kelly; that’s over $20,000 in trips in just over three years.

Some marvel at her luck, and some want to know her precise secret. After all, she watches the show, takes notes, enters the contest...there has to be some secret, right? Others even wonder why the show’s producers haven’t blacklisted her from ever winning another trip from them.

There is only one secret to her life--and it is also the answer to all questions: two million pennies in one pocket. The symbol of, and I’ll say it again, her infinite generosity.

$20,000 is a lot of pennies, but I know I have seen all two million of those pennies go from her pocket into the hands of others.

You’d think two million pennies in one pocket would be really heavy for her.

But they aren’t--empty pockets weigh heavier.

I refused to close my eyes

oday's writer's notebook topic was on dreams, lullabies, nightmares, spells, or magic.  We will be beginning A Midsummer Night's Dream in the coming weeks and I wanted my classes to start writing about some of the imagery, ideas, themes, and words.  My entry written side by side with my students is below:

Dreams fascinate me as does the notion that people study dreams--and study them to interpret them which then tells us something about ourselves.  You can't predetermine what you want to dream about--sometimes you can't even recall what you dream about--and there are dreams which never leave us--the dreams I had as a child have stuck with me through well over 30-35 years--one recurring dream I had as a child always rises to the top of my dreams memories: a marching band of soldiers approaches me--I couldn't see them and never did--simply stopping their feet to the slow rhythm of several bass drums--I was in a neighborhood, and no one else was outside--the band still approached, relentlessly, tirelessly--they were close, just on the other side of the hilly road I stood in the middle of--there were no cars--no traffic, so sound except the sound of feet and drum, feet and drum--the sky was blue and cloudless--all of the houses were one story tall--each house and lawn was neat and tidy and bright--the day was bright like the sunshine in an Edward Hopping painting--and yet there was nothing friendly, nothing welcoming--it was an imposing moment which I dreamed over and over and over--it frightened me--as I layed awake many nights I refused to close my eyes--and often lost--not wanting to shut my eyes for fear of standing frozen in the middle of that neighborhood street before the advance of a dull thud of a band of soliders I couldn't see.

Edward Hopper: Sunlight on Brownstones

Why I Write

y Tweet to #whyiwrite in recognition of today being National Writing Day: I write because it is an imperfect art accessible through its forgiveness of our imperfections and humanity. 

Yesterday, I gave my students the prompt Why I Write in anticipation and recognition of today being National Writing Day.  As I've learned to do through the NWP I write alongside of my students--yesterday was no exception.  The following is what I produced in my Writer's Notebook writing alongside of them:

I write for the _______  --there are so many reasons why I write that I find it difficult to place a thumbtack on one reason.  I write now, in this moment, to show you, my students that I do write, that I write alongside of you, that my writing isn't necessarily great or creative or inspirational--I write to show you that we all can struggle with it--I write because it is an imperfect art accessible through its forgiveness of our imperfections and humanity--I write for myself outside of class because it allows me to be private in public--in the moments that I write I am alone with my thoughts and I still realize others may read it--I wrote last November to grieve over the death of my beloved dog, Rain--I wrote last December to remember and celebrate the many loving uncles and aunts and grandparents I've been blessed by--I wrote Monday afternoon with my Nature Journal club to observe the outdoors, to relax and refocus myself--it can be a kind of therapy or cleansing as much as it can be a way to play and explore and create...

Altering one's aspect towards the sun

he transition to an NWP-inspired writer's workshop classroom has continued to move smoothly now that we are through our third calendar week of school.

Some concerns voiced early by colleagues from around the region during the NWP Summer Institute had to do with being in "literature-based" classrooms.  How do we use the writing-based methods in a literature-based classroom?

I'm learning it isn't a square peg - round hole scenario.

Writing and reading are so co-dependent that it seems silly to me now to even type that statement.  A piece of the fear I suppose is more clearly stated, how can we devote so much time for students to write what they want when I have content and literature to teach?

Again, I'm learning it isn't a square peg - round hole scenario.  To borrow from the spirit of what Virginia Woolf meant when she wrote, "I don't believe in aging, I believe in forever altering one's aspect towards the sun."  We don't have to view ourselves as teachers as on a set of rails.  The methods we use are one of many possibilities.  I learned this summer after 17 years of teaching that I need to be willing to believe that there is another way.

My example over the last week brings Stephen Crane to the table, front and center.  Our students had to read The Red Badge of Courage as one of their summer reading selections.  And they struggled with it.  Some offer their soured opinions of it openly.  I and my colleagues in my building have also heard the opinions of some adults that the book is too hard for these kids and that their kids hated it.

Well, time to roll up our sleeves then and get to work.

Learning is allowed to be uncomfortable at times.  With a published RL of 7.43 (appropriate for grades 7-8, or ages 12-14) that hardly seems to be the issue.  The kids I teach are generally good readers--I often find that they have a current YA title in their hand when moving class to class.  I even had a boy recommend a book to me (Way of the Peaceful Warrior, by Dan Millman) last week.  Several students have already borrowed novels from my classroom library on their own.  The issue, in this case, I believe rests in the fact that TRBC is not necessarily a novel which hurtles along a rollicking plot line.  Plot isn't at the forefront.  It is built upon the psychology of one soldier and develops with thickly ladled imagery.  It isn't anything like what most of the kids I teach read.

At NWP we're taught to ask our kids, "what have you read which is like what you are trying to write?"

I took that lesson from this summer, altered the way I looked at the sun, and placed a small passage by Crane under my classroom ELMO document camera and projected it on the wall.  I circled nouns, highlighted adjectives, underlined verbs, noted articles and pronouns and phrases and clauses.  And then together as a class we would write like Crane...we would imitate this passage.  Where Crane placed an article, we would place an article.  Where Crane crafted a prepositional phrase, we would craft a prepositional phrase, etc.

What have you read which is like what you are trying to write?

I told them we must change the subject of what we are imitating.  That took knowledge of the passage.  We read it aloud, discussed it, and decided that Crane took the time, showed the patience, to describe a "horde" of soldiers moving forward.  However, a student noted that it was more than that.  It was how two different sets of eyes might describe the "horde" of soldiers--some might say they were grizzled and angry and ready to tear a house apart piece of wood by piece of wood, others might suggest they were sad, hungry, and weak.

We decided to write our passage about a "swarm" of butterflies from the perception of someone who loves nature, and then from the perception of a child.

As we plugged in words shouted out at each step, a student offered that this was like Mad Libs. And it seemed like they were having fun as we wrote in the style of Crane, as we imitated the syntax of a author they were grumbling about just a few weeks ago.

Our "original" Crane passage...by the way "blithe" is one of our vocabulary words so we were excited to include it:

Some whispered of golden, freckled swarms that were drifting with blithe dips and twisting ascents with awe-inspiring beauty; fragile wings of gentle creatures who flutter like autumn in the wind.  Others cheered floating and eternally playful crayons that played tag in the sky.

I loved their piecing together the perception of children....butterflies are crayons playing tag.

After modeling this, I distributed a variety of brief passages by Crane and asked them to do the same thing individually.

The lesson allowed me to circulate around the room and assist kids with identifying parts of speech, and it also allowed me to dust off the classroom set of the most foreign of books to my kids--the thesaurus.  I gave each kid one to use to grow their writing as we also discussed imagery and motif in small, individual conferences.  The lesson also offered opportunities for me to talk about Crane in small chunks, one on one with kids, as they worked on deciphering what we meant and how his craft influenced his story.

The kids wrote about things they wanted to but in the patterns and style of Crane.  I heard Cranesque passages about everything from football and lacrosse to pumpkin picking and dance lessons.  When the students read them aloud to the class we noted the similar cadence and rhythm in what we wrote, but the vastly different stories.  We noted that this imitative lesson made us be patient as writers and it taught us to be open-minded toward an author and a book some despised only days ago.

We have repeated the lesson twice so far--I'm hopeful at least a few will choose to continue to work on their Crane piece and submit it as one of their upcoming essays and/or submit it to a teen magazine such as Teen Ink (which is an online magazine).  Some of what they shared was just so beautiful that it would be a shame to keep it cooped up in their writer's notebooks for eternity.

Writing is thinking, and I do believe that even in our traditional content-based literature classrooms, we can alter what we've always done and use writing more as a vehicle for taking the kids, and ourselves, beyond anyplace we've ever visited before in our classrooms.