Reflecting on inflicting writing punishments

This week has been one of thinking and writing and learning. I love the summers when I can stop and think about what I have done in my classes and what I want to do in my classes.  Reflection is good for the soul and I have always found that it is through reflection that I come to find new avenues to explore. I am excited to take back so many ideas for reaching my students on so many different levels.  Understanding how students learn to read, what reading looks like to the beginning reader gives me a place to start thinking about how writing might look to a student who isn't a writer--the confusion that occurs when pen meets blank paper and the mind goes into confused mode as it tries to think of what would please the teacher or not make the writer look like an idiot or just get something down and get out of this horrible situation.  I will certainly think about this.  I also am contemplating the plethora of systems that are in place (as schools complete their summer work and idea shopping) to squelch the last juice of creativity out of the students.  I am talking about formula writing that has invaded many of the classrooms in various forms.  Some of the purveyors of these formulas have received grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others to broadcast this punishment of the student much further than their own confines.  And I am concerned that the most well-meaning folks fall into the traps of not trusting students to make their own decisions about their writing.  I am shivering in the July heat just thinking about how this will play out for future writers.

Making Human Students not Paper Pushing Robots

It is 8 pm and the sun is setting; a peaceful shady calm covers the neighborhood I see from my study window.  There is no traffic and my body has almost cooled down from the uphill walk in the neighborhood that usually brings some peace to my hectic life and affords me the time to mull the things I have experienced during the day.  Some days there are few things to ponder; others, too much to review in thirty minutes.  Today is the latter.  After two great demos in SI today and a visit to my principal to ask him to support yet another activity that I want for my students, I am thinking about students and how we class them.  It seems that scientific defining of genus, phylum, etc. extends to everything--files for the file cabinet; books on the shelf; pets; and yes, children. Tracking has been outlawed for many years; but it is alive and well all over most of the school districts with which I am familiar.  At my high school, we have regular, honors, and AP English, biology, chemistry, and so on.  Although we also have an "open enrollment" policy, some kids will never see a class above regular.  They are shepherded by well-meaning counselors (and sometimes parents) into the lower classes.  There they are often work-sheeted to death.

In my school district, all students must be allowed to take a test again if they don't do well the first time.  Although they can't make a grade higher than 85, they are still given that second chance.  This goes for not handing in work on time--they get an extension.  Some teachers give then a deadline:  all work for this marking period must be in two days before they marking period ends.  Are we doing these children a favor?  Are we helping them?  I think not.  It has been my experience that kids rise to expectations.  So I make mine pretty high and ninety-nine percent of the time I am not disappointed.  A mother of a college freshman shared this story with me the other day.  Her son went to UNC-Charlotte last fall, competent that he would breeze through his classes, including the introduction to engineering class that he was so excited to take.  Some weeks into the semester he failed the first test miserably and called his mother to tell her he failed the test and the professor would not allow him to retest.  He was devastated, pleaded with his mother to call the dean.  This was a tough introduction to the real academic world and certainly a testimonial to Alfie Kohn's book, Punishment by Rewards.  The mother asked me to help other students by not allowing retesting and make up work.  I am all for helping student--I like reading their work and working through difficult texts with them.  But I want them to be independent thinkers--the same as they are when I see them working with little children in arfterschool programs, the drugstore, the pizza parlor.  It is as if they change skins from the school house to the workplace.  I want to see that workplace attitude in my classroom.

Okay, folks, that's my rant.

Fiction and the Common Core

Powerful talk about writing and reading today.  I can't quit thinking about the idea that fiction is valuable to our students--to help them tell their stories, to help them see the world and put names and faces on it, to learn behavioral patterns and the repercussions of each, good and bad.  I want to think about this literature thing during the summer months so that I will have some idea of how to broach it this fall as we get into the full swing of Common Core. I worry that I am starting to work in an area that I don't believe in.  I've always been able to walk away when I didn't believe, but this time I have to stay, at least for a while.  Now I'm thinking about how I can hack into this system and put my brand on it. I want to take every single I can statement and make it into something palatable for my students and me.  I already know that the nonfiction part will be literary criticism.  That will help them think like the critic they will have to become on the AP exam.  Hacking may just be the answer to the whole thing.  And not just hacking into the Common Core dialogue (monologue?) but hacking into this whole cultural idea that if the piece of writing isn't self-help, how to make money, cheat your neighbor, etc. then it has no value.  It seems to me that when we devalue the story we devalue the conscience.

The Six Word Memoir

The six-word memoir.  There it is. Staring me in the face. Six words--pick six words from the 650,000 or so in the English language.  String them together in a self-identification way.  Whatcha got?  The words fly up and down in my brain like popcorn kernels.  Pick six. Any six.  Who am I today?  What am I thinking?  What describes me?

Why do I have such a hard time picking six words?  It's not the end of the world.  It's not even close.  Six words.  Pick six words.  Is it that I don't want to exclude all the others by picking this particular group?  Is it that once I pick six I don't have another chance?  It's like that quote I kept on my computer at the newspaper for years that went something like this: "Once you write the first paragraph you realize the rest is not going to be the great work you imagined."  Like the Grimm brothers' Clever Elsie who never got anything done because she spent all her time working through the what-ifs, I hesitate to write (or pick my six words) so that I will not have yet messed up the story.  I hem and haw.  I write two words and mark them out.  Not good enough.  What will folks think?  What do they expect from me?  I have to have the best six words--astounding in their truth and beauty.  Shining emblems of the use of the language.  Smart thinking.  Smart talking.

So, what will they be?  Which six words will I choose?  Today I don't have to write each word on an index card and video tape it, upload the video to Youtube so everybody knows I didn't pick the best words.  Today--today I only have to write them.  I need to pick the six words.  What are they?

Suddenly I have it.  Exactly six words.  Exact description of me--of my mirrored self today.  The perfect six words.  Ah! Got my crap together then lost it.  A mantra.

Thinking about thinking and thinking about writing

It is 9 o'clock on a Sunday evening and I am tired.  My back aches from performing unnatural (to me) acts: washing dishes, helping to prepare meals, folding laundry, vacuuming--endless vacuuming, watering plants--all the household chores that I am easing back into after years of sitting in front of a computer day and night, teaching students, and traveling from one job to another.  I approached most of the chores with dread and some with the apprehension that I no longer knew how to do any of those things (I am out of the cooking habit totally).  However, I found the experience to be pleasant and in some ways liberating.  Doing actual physical work frees me up to think--to think unconditionally without feeling like I have to record my thinking somewhere in a blogpost, an email, an essay, notes for an essay, and so forth.  Nope.  I could just think and I could just let the thoughts come and go in my head at will.  They didn't have to linger or attach themselves to anything.  There was no deadline.  I had all day to just let the thoughts run around in my head.  That freedom felt good and I actually was able to think through a couple of worrisome things and find solutions.  Now, what made this thinking different from the hard thinking of double-entry journals, responses to emails, drafting a paper?  The freedom.  There was no structure and no rules.  I could think what I wanted to think and move to another thought any time I wanted to.  So I'm wondering if this isn't like giving our students the freedom to write whatever they want and think it before they have to put it into some kind of structure.  If they could start an essay (school work) by writing a poem about what they think and then moving the ideas in that poem to another genre and so on until they reach the form of the persuasive essay, would that not give them the time and the freedom to think what they think before they have to write what they think?

I'm looking forward to tomorrow evening when I will again apply my rusty domestic skills to some clothes sorting and have that beautiful time to think what I want to think.

Journal writing via cyberspace

I have worked with students and writing for more than twenty years and before that with my own children.  Journaling, for me, is a way of life.  I write on scraps of paper, in notebooks, and now online.  I encourage my students to keep journals while they are in my classes and to continue the practice when they leave me.


My granddaughter, Maggie, has had a journal for most of her six years and has written sporadically in the journal during visits to G's house.  A storyteller, Maggie tells fantastic tales about princesses and dragons that sometimes mimic fairy tales and some of the Disneyfied versions.  And, because she is a talker and a storyteller, Maggie is still much more in the telling phase than in the writing phase of her stories.  This summer we have let the journal drop until swim team is over and my work schedule lightens.  


A couple of days ago, my grandson, Henry, who lives quite a distance away, opened up a Skype video call to ask me to help him with his journal writing. A rising second grader, Henry's school assigned journal writing as a summer project.  He has been fairly diligent about writing in the journal over the summer, but was in need of new ideas.  So we talked.


First thing we dispelled the idea that a parent person should draw lines on his paper for him to follow.  Then we had to talk about what to write about.  The weather seemed like a good place to start and we started there:  "It is hot today."  But Henry's ideas went to a visit to the park, an opportunity to observe and perhaps collect some caterpillars, and a short record of how the present caterpillars in captivity are faring.  All in all, a fruitful journal writing time.  Later, Henry asked if we could set up a weekly appointment for his journal writing.  

And we will do that.  I was fascinated with the whole idea of Skyping a journal session and with watching Henry's thoughts develop on the page.  My help was limited to asking questions that might lead to writing, somewhat like questioning students in conferences to help them expand their pieces.  I wonder if the questions will lead to Henry thinking about what could go next without prompting.  And I'm wondering about this long distance cooperative journal writing.  I can see this working on so many levels.



  

What to Keep, What to Let Go

The UNCC Writing Project's Summer Institute comes to an end on Friday and I already am missing the daily conversations and the excitement as we make connections, scribble notes in our daybooks, and think--collectively and alone.  This always is the time of year when I realize how important it is to be "in the conversation."  Even if it's just sitting in the same room with others who are thinking and working, there is some kind of connection that takes place.

I never would be writing in this space if I had not attended the summer institute.  To say what I think is difficult for me probably because for so many years I have opened my mouth and inserted my foot.  I have had to learn the hard way that silence sometimes is golden and to remember Abraham Lincoln's advice to write a letter, put it aside and read it the next day before deciding whether to mail it.  Now here I am putting my thoughts right out here, hitting publish when I finish and not thinking that I might ought to wait a day before saying what I'm thinking.

For a couple of days we have, off and on, talked about hoarding and holding onto things we should let go.  They always turn to me since for three years I've been working on a self-discovery video about my own hoarding of books and other things that I don't need but am afraid to let go.  I pulled out the dusty storyboards again and vowed to finish that video before school starts this fall.  The unfinished video cluttering my computer's storage space is another example of my not finishing what I start and I've been pondering that trait as well.  I am packing up things to sell or give away and I am tying up loose ends with things in my house--organizing, sorting, pitching.

So today I invited the group to think about what to let go and what to keep as we begin another school year.  Here's what I have decided to let go and what to keep and I hope somewhere in this listing is a key to my holding onto stuff way long after it should have been recycled or loved by someone else.

Here's what I'm letting go:
The fear that I'm not good enough.
The fear that if I can't do it the first time people will think I'm stupid
The idea that everybody knows more technology than I do
All my insecurities
(and clothes that I'll never wear even if the price tag is still attached)

Here's what I'm keeping:
The technology I'm using in my classroom and some new that I'm adding
Ideas for papers I want to write--particularly one on complex texts and one on women (rights, discriminations, bodies, and so on)
My work and my writing and my determination to write every day and to write with purpose and conviction
My friends

I have let go so much and every time I let something else go I feel a great weight lifted from my head.  I love the energy that comes from a clean empty space.