What's right with writing?

What have we learned about writing and the teaching of writing?
It’s been said that “creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training” [Anna Freud], and I guess that the same can be true for no training. Until attending NIWP SI, I had been assuming that I was a lucky mind who have survived no training. Writing instruction during my high school experience included one 50 minute session during ninth grade in which the teacher projected another student’s essay on the wall while we picked out mistakes and made suggestions. It was helpful, eye opening, civil and I think we managed to finish without hurting the girl’s feelings. It only happened once.
For whatever reason, our teachers were under the impression that writing instruction consisted in crafting the perfect prompt. They believed that given enough models in our reading, we students would develop our own unique writing style and excel.
After the first two weeks of SI 2011, I was wondering how I had any sense of style. And then I remembered. Remembered all the hours of reading, all the books we rushed through, all those genres the teachers were so anxious to expose us to. Without studying the research, they knew that reading was the key ingredient to writing well. They never audibly made the connections and so I did not notice that I was actually receiving an education in writing.
Looking back both on my experience and my development as a writer, I think that the one big lesson I have begun to tackle in the teaching of writing is that we need to read and we need to read for pleasure.

Why does writing matter?
Why does writing matter? It is the question we writers ask ourselves daily, sometimes twice an hour. It is the question our students ask us every time a new task is assigned. Why does this matter, this act of pirouetting our pen nibs for protracted periods? Or why should we commit the creations of imagination to the virtual page? It is not a question with a pat, an easy answer, but the answer does lie somewhere in the human inclination to pay tribute to beauty and truth. In order to be connected to the rich tradition of history and of art, we recognize the necessity of participating in it. It is a lofty goal, this participation. Sometimes the goal seems pretentious, prideful, ridiculous, or [and this is how our students often see it] unattainable. But every writing assignment is the beginning of this participation. Every letter, every sentence is an exercise in perseverance, in persistence.
The answer to “why does writing matter” is poignantly expressed by young adult writer Clare Dunkle, in her book Close Kin. Toward the middle of the story, [which is inhabited by elves and goblins], a young goblin man, Seylin, encounters an elf camp and is allowed to stay, due to his good looks. He is well educated and rather sophisticated. The elves are living in squalor, barely able to survive the winter. During the scene in question, a young elf girl, Sable, brings out a book in which the camp chief used to chronicle the events of the camp’s inhabitants. The elves no longer know how to read or write. Seylin reads several stories to Sable, realizing how much he takes for granted…realizing how much of the elves’ recent history has been lost forever.
I set Dunkle’s book aside and realize with a pang that the reason I write…the reason writing is so important to me is that I am terrified of being forgotten.

The Writing - Family Connection
The first time I wrote about my family I was a junior in college. I had just moved out of my parent’s house, my brother had just cured himself of cancer; I was lonely and homesick and relieved all at the same time. I held our relationships up to the light from a distance and began to author a profile of each of us. I felt guilty at first, felt like I was putting words in my siblings’ mouths. I realized that we have a lot of flaws, too many for the perfect family our friends make us out to be sometimes. But discovering those flaws wasn’t a depressing thing. It was more of an exercise in becoming aware of them for the first time and suddenly finding myself to address at least a few of them. By the end of the essay process I had learned more about our dynamic and the magic that held us together than I had ever appreciated. Two years later, I look back at my writing and feel as if a second chapter is needed. We have all changed, mostly for the better. New problems have cropped up and new blessings. SI 2011 has brought another dimension to my retrospective glance. I see the importance of telling our story, not only for myself, but for my family as well. By giving me publication as a goal, NIWP SI has helped hone my confidence and plan my second chapter.
Not every student will want to write about their family. Some do not even want to think about their close relatives. For students who suffer from emotional neglect or a broken home, school is a place to escape and dwelling on problems does more harm than good. For a lot of students, however, a long, close look at their family is the perfect antidote to teen-aged egocentrism and complacency. Writing about family can make students realize how lucky they are. It can give kids a reason to reconnect, a project for their siblings to gather around. Writing about family can help tease out their own shortcomings, can help them see for the first time how they affect their family: how they count, how they matter.

What do our students need to help them write well?
Routine
Every veteran writer talks about the necessity in writing every day. There are books written about the rituals writers go through before putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. By giving students a routine, a length of time that they can count on being set aside for creativity, we can take some of the angst out of free writing and revising. We are creatures of habit. As much as some teachers, well-meaning and young teachers, get excited about having something new and exciting to do every day, teenagers thrive on their routines as much as adults do. Students’ lives are hectic, scattered and over-scheduled. If we want to keep their writing from reflecting those characteristics, then it is very important to establish a writing routine that is sacred and realistic.
Opportunities to take risks
Looking back on my development as a teenaged writer in high school, I have often wondered why I ever did my homework…why I spent upwards of 6 hours on every writing assignment. I have wondered because the grade that we would receive would not count. It existed, but not in our GPA. Without getting into the unwritten grade for good attitude, let me hypothesis for a minute why I did those assignments. I think that it was because the assignments were a safe place to take risks. I could write a poem instead of a traditional expository essay and not worry about doing a perfect job. I would still get a grade, but if it was bad it didn’t count and if it was good the comments still stroked my ego and helped me gauge my skill. I never took risks on test essays, the only essays that counted.
With this experience in my repertoire, I know the benefits or risk taking as well as the pitfalls. If students know that they have a few assignments that “don’t really count,” the more motivated ones will use the occasion to push their writing. The risk taking will develop there style and pay dividends that we can never really measure. At the same time, unmotivated students will see assignments that “don’t really count” as an occasion to slack off or not produce at all. The other pit fall is that any assessment that includes a timed and focused write will elicit from students their safest work. I want to remind myself that when setting up “don’t really count” situations I need to build in some kind of incentive, be it bonus points, publication, stickers. In the perfect world, top notch feedback would be enough. I also want to remember that the essay tests of my high school memory are really in a genre of their own, and while a good writer will be able to sit down and formulate a formal essay in two hours and fifty-five minutes, it most likely will not be the kind of writing that rocks the world or changes a child’s life.
Recognition
As a student, I thrived on recognition. Alright, you are right, I still thrive on it. In middle and high school, there was a certain type of recognition that I believe I wrote every paper with the intention of achieving: getting your English essay read aloud to the class. The readings were always done anonymously and only the best papers received the recognition. It was a type of publication. If the teacher handed back papers without reading one or two, we all wondered what we had done and worried we had failed.
I believe that there are only a handful of students in each classroom that are truly uncomfortable with publication and recognition. Most students thrive on having a moment when everyone is focusing on their writing, on them. They drink in the focused energy and turn it into motivation and creativity. I want to be sure to include a variety of modes of publication in my classroom. Recognition is one of the driving forces behind our willingness to improve as writers. The silent Emily Dickinsons are few and far between. We writing teachers need to give our students the force they need to write well.

What stands in the way of powerful writing instruction?
The attitude that some students are good writers and others just aren’t. I have seen this destroy not only a writing career but students total sense of academic self-confidence.

Top Ten Tips for Revising

10. Read Muriel Harris’ article on “Composing behaviors…” Over-analyze your own writing process until total panic and block sets in.
9. Realize that procrastination will not make you a one draft wonder.
8. Type three sentences. Correct all spelling mistakes to get rid of the annoying red squiggly lines and then feel guilty about it.
7. Consider re-mispelling the words to see how it feels to “write without worrying about spelling.”
6. Type three paragraphs. Reconsider your theme. Delete all three paragraphs.
5. Suddenly recall the importance of keeping multiple drafts. Click “Undo Edit.”
4. Cut and paste original three sentences into new document, begin to start over and wonder how pre-Microsoft authors ever had time for book signings and Good Morning America spots.
3. Recall they didn’t have spell check either…
2. Periodically listen to the monotone computerized male voice that came with your formatting software plow his way through the few paragraphs you’ve managed to peck out.
1. Realize that anything that sounds good during the exercise found in tip 2 must be sacred.

What He Could Do

Snip my brown hair
with left-handed scissors,
Read by christmas tree, choke
on a loony. Bite
 his tongue and stop breathing.
Play Beethoven.

Teach me to do his homework, science
 terms, clock
creeping past ten for
the first time.

Cleanse his way out of cancer,
lung kind, no chemo. Feel
 the vibration of colors.
Turn piano book pages. Listen.
Touch my feet till I cry.

Four Camping Commandments

Sit where only the
        chirping sees you.
Smell the
        swimming of the fish.
Weave rushes together and
Listen to the tips of grass
                        tickle your ears.

Describe what the word 'leadership' means to you...

Leadership means understanding that you will never be “ready enough” and beginning anyways. Leadership means being frightened by the degree to which others trust you and consoled by the fact that you must trust them back. It means waiting for the more qualified person sitting beside you to call things to order and then realizing that the task will fall to you. Leadership means leaving human respect somewhere near your photos from middle school. It means being slightly scrupulous so that harmful gossip will never have substantiation and ignoring the harmless gossip, because it will never go away. It means sacrificing your credibility, should the common good so require. Leadership means sharing your experience and adding an infusion of candour and honesty to the cases of “group think” that you come across. It requires you to vocalize your imagination even when you think they’ll laugh at you. It means having more energy than you have. Leadership means educating and education needs leaders.

“Non-Magical Thinking…” A response

    I would like to briefly address the principal’s position that Janet Emig mentions in her article “Non-Magical Thinking: Presenting Writing Developmentally in Schools.” This principal passed a note to the teacher leading a writing workshop that said “I’ll come back when you are teaching.” We see this as the attitude of a behind-the-times administrator, but when I was involved in my first writing workshop, the “I’ll come back when you’re teaching” attitude was subscribed to by most of us workshop participants, at least for the first two months. I think that we were so overwhelmed by the fluidity and flexibility of the workshop that it felt like frustration and lack of teaching to us. Part of the frustration was due, I think, to the fact that the sessions were too short and two far apart to get enough done. The other aspect that frustrated us was that we were attending highly structured class before and after the workshop session. This is just my personal, one time experience, but I think that for me it is good to realize that my high school students will be in the same boat if and when I choose to do a writing workshop with them. They will have highly structured classes before and after my English time with them, and the fifty minutes we have together will not be enough to easily get in the swing of things. I do know, however, that it does work and that being aware of the difficulties is half the battle.

I Am From

I am from sheet music,

from Ticonderoga and paintbrushes.

I am from the scales of six music lessons,

[cacophony, hovering,

we did not like duets].

I am from the lilac,

the spruce,

whose long gone limbs I remember

as if they were my own.

I’m from Midnight Mass and crooked fingers,

from Milada and André.

I’m from the interruptions and choir rehearsals at 10 pm.

I’m from because I’m the mom and on dit le chapelet

and fish and chips and vinegar.

I’m from reading Tolkien aloud by dome light.

I’m from Assiniboine and Ste. Boniface,

Oyster stew and kolache.

From my grandpa’s commanding officer

to the bullet that killed him,

the empty chamber in Grandpa’s gun.

Beneath a lid of corrugation and duct tape

confusing the baptismal gown and shoes

and candle, a Hallmark’s worth of notes

ignore the years till time lyricises even the thank yous.

They Look at You

They look at you the way they did when their shoes were untied and 
their fingers were too small to twist the laces. Even now they don't 
wear lace ups often. They buckle and  Velcro and slip their way to the 
admissions office and the audition booth.  They slipper their feet 
over to me and offer an espresso wrapped in college applications and 
scholarship essays. They look at me with those eyes that I never had a 
chance to practice on an older sister. And so it is that I help them 
tie yet another neat bow.

NAEP Response

September 2010. I sat in the testing center at the University of Idaho, Moscow, staring at a blank document on the computer screen, watching the first few minutes of my allotted time blink away. I was supposed to be writing two essays, back to back. I was supposed to be typing already. I had a three by five card and a nubby pencil with which to organize my thoughts. I had the promise of fifty dollars for participating in this study. I would never get a grade. I would never have to read this bit of writing again. But oh was it ever hard to get started. And oh did I grimace before hitting those submit buttons in quick succession.

You see, the proctors and the test creators had stipulated that we could only have an index card and a substandard pencil and, as the NAEPFACTS from April 1996 suggest, student writers who engage in process writing achieve, on average, higher results. The margin of difference, based on the data, was about 20 points. It is interesting to note, however, that the most successful type of outlining across the grade levels was not the writing of first drafts or alternate drafts but simply was list making and “outlining” in general. Simple lists and bullets were enough to help students pull ahead.

While NAEPFACTS seems to suggest a very rigid type of prewriting thanks to all of their charts and facts [prewriting that may seem diametrically opposed to the fluidity advocated by Janet Emig in her article “Non-Magical Thinking,”], making a list before writing an essay is really a very flexible and fluid approach to prewriting. List making is very close to the initial thought patterns that would emerge in response to a prompt. List making can even be its own form of poetry in some situations. I think that the only real opposition that can be seen between NAEP and Emig is that fact that Emig opposes the type of prompt-centered, time-constrained writing that the NAEP organization assesses and encourages. NAEP asks the question “Can students benefit from process writing?” We could re-ask the question: “Is it important for teachers to continually repeat rules for outlining?” My answer is this: if you are preparing kids for a time constrained writing assessment, you must teach them how to quickly and efficiently outline their thoughts in a format appropriate to the subject material. If, however, they are writing a self proposed piece, a little bit of encouragement might be necessary, but the prewriting should be, if at all possible, less rigid, more fluid and more creative. I think that the biggest battle we face is getting kids to see what they think to be the final draft of their work as what it really is: maybe draft two in a parade of 11 drafts. With NAEP assessments this is obviously not the case. In that sense NAEP writing assessments are artificial, far removed from the natural writing process. The results of NAEP demonstrate student abilities to speed write, to process information at rates we would never expect from veteran writers. If we have expectations of great writing in such situations, then of course we must standardize the prewriting process. Perhaps, like my proctors from 2010, we must even shrink the size of paper and pencil to keep those lists and outlines as efficient as possible.

Now That You Go to School....

Response to “Now that You Go to School,” by Britton

The question I have chosen to ask, and attempt to answer, is found in the discussion question section of this article on page 17. “Would ‘transactional’ writing ever benefit from having the characteristics Britton associates with ‘expressive’ or ‘poetic; writing? Could transactional writing ever have these characteristics?” It is just a wonderful place both to start and to pause. For me, there is an easy “yes. yes” answer to both of these questions which stems from my reading and enjoying the poetry of handwritten “transactional” letters, both those of famous writers and family members. It stems from my having picked up a cook book the other day and being astonished at the beauty of the recipe introductions and pausing at the history behind the foods. Britton writes that “a piece of transactional writing may elicit the statement of other views [while]…poetic writing…demands an audience that does not interrupt” [11]. We don’t read a poem and then immediately think “I need to write a poem.” But there is definitely room for portions of transactional writing to assume the poetic stance. Perhaps it is the passage of time the grants this status. It is something that I definitely want to explore further.

In fact, I am going to predict that it is the passage of time and the reduction of the pragmatic relevance of transactional writing that elevates is to the expressive and even the poetic. There is a certain poetry to unsent letters, just as there is an ascertainable poetry in the missives of Cicero and Vergil. There is an expressive quality to imagining a grandparent’s grocery list. After the passage of a century, a property deed becomes an archival treasure. If we can divorce transactional writing from time, the infusion of eternity somehow elevates it.

Connection: The idea of using expressive and poetic texts to actually respond other poetic pieces created a lot of connections for me. On page 11, Britton juxtaposed Hamlet with  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Both pieces can stand on their own as works of art but one definitely came first and inspired the other. It reminds me of the way literature itself immerges as a response to reality or to history. It reminds me of the year my literature professor allowed us to choose any form of writing we wanted for our final “essay,” it just had to address a book we had read in some way. I wrote a short story that took place in More’s Utopia. I ended up having to reread Utopia two or three times to gather all the facts I needed but in the end I held a piece I could be proud of; a piece that could stand on its own and yet is completely immersed in More’s original understanding.

Response: My response, my personal reaction to this piece by Britton…it really made me want to respond to literature with actual literature of my own and to allow my students to do the same. It is a practice that infuses excitement and energy but that simultaneously pushes kids to look even further into the literature they wish to “comment” on creatively.

Visualize: My visual attempts to describe a question that this piece leaves me with: As we continue to refine transactional and expressive speech until it reaches a poetic level, does truth/reality/actually suffer? As our writing becomes more efficient, do our stories become fiction?

EXPRESSIVE ­---------------------------------------------  POETIC

TRUTH ----------------------------------------------------  EMPELLISHMENT

"I, You, and It" - The Importance of Empathy

When I began reading “I, You, It” by James Moffett, the first thing that I noticed and circled was the date, 1965. After the first couple of paragraphs, I found myself thinking that this article could have been written within the last year, the ideas are so pertinent and problems and their solutions seem so timeless.

            There was one sentence that does not flow from the mentality of this decade, however. Moffett writes on page 24 of the article that as a child grows, “he gradually yields up his initial, emotionally preferred vantage point, and expands his perspective so as to include many other points of view.” Moffett writes this as a synthesis of Piaget and Vygotsky, and is simply adding his vote to the idea that empathy is an integral part of the process of psychological development.

            Empathy has been studied extensively in the last century, but research has gone even further in the last two decades as educators, researchers and parents discover a growing trend in a narcissism that children are forgetting to grow out of. The implications of this trend cannot be ignored. Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatric correspondent and author worries about our country’s future leadership in his article, “The End of Empathy.” [http://www.foxnews.com/health/2010/06/01/end-empathy/]. It is true that, while our long-term goal as teachers is to prepare the next generation of leaders, our more immediate concern in to assist our students in grasping the content we teach. What is equally true is the fact that narcissism stands in the way of education, especially the realm of learning how to write. How can we expect students to write complex characters or individualized emotions if they are only used to operating in reference to their own emotions? How can we expect them to master 1^st and 2^nd and 3^rd person?

            Good writing requires empathy. When students can mentally substitute another’s experience and feeling for their own, the process of committing it to paper becomes doable. While empathy is a natural part of development, something has allowed that natural process to be compromised. Individualized experience has been encouraged through social media and empathy is now expressed by the facebook "like" button. There are websites, projects, studies and mentorship programs devoted to the art of teaching real empathy, but I believe that the best way to give empathy the rights and respect it deserves is to model it for our students. Students often complain the teachers don’t see things from their point of view. We must value the behavior that we expect from these kids.

Take away from The Courage to Teach

I took away this lesson from Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach: I need to get up earlier. If I continue to sleep in I will have no time to save the world :].

This is partially me trying not to get to serious in the face of what is generally sensed to be an “Education Crisis.” It is partially a tongue in cheek response to Palmer’s final chapter calling individuals to initiate social change. But it is mostly me being honest with myself.

I have been neglecting what I like to call my interior life, and if the point of this book is to explore what Palmer calls “the inner landscape of a teacher’s life,” than I have a responsibility to actually have a landscape to explore. Nurturing that landscape takes time, but only if I spend the time cultivating it will I really have the privilege of teaching subjectively. If I do not develop myself to be an interesting, insightful person who reads and thinks and writes regularly, then I will be left standing with only a bag of techniques and an insufficient repertoire. This book has been for me a call to action to attack my must read list, my must-write list and set experiential goals for myself so that I have the option of passing those experiences on to my students.