Writing well includes having something worth saying

I have always wanted to be a writer professionally, but earlier in my life–particularly when I was a student choosing how to direct my vocation–I didn’t feel that I had anything worth saying. Whatever I said, I said well–that’s what my teachers usually told me–but never had I been praised for saying things particularly insightful or worthwhile. In my eyes, the lack was a real issue, so I directed myself away from the writing life.

Years later, I am convinced I was right. I wrote a few things in notebooks during that time, and each piece exudes that lack of content, that ability to say nothing well. My best writing all ended up in letters I wrote to a girl, a girl to whom I had so much to say I couldn’t find the time to write it all down. I have never re-read those letters, but I assume they’re much better than what’s in the notebooks, since the recipient later married me.

The conviction that content matters directs much of how I teach writing. I do not enjoy sending students into frenzies where they do not know what to write. Few are the people in the world who attempt to write text without a clearly prescribed purpose and area of content from which to pull. Thus, few business executives, salespeople, marketers, business owners, and great aunts get writer’s block, because they know why they are writing and what it is they need to say. Knowing this, when I present a writing task to my students, I give them a purpose, not a genre.

I admit that my thinking arises mostly from personal experience and conviction, but lately I have bumped into a pair of articles that have buoyed my thinking. One is an article sitting in my cubicle about supporting the six traits in writing, which is about the most unlikely thing in the world for me to read (my eyes cross at the mention of the six traits). Yet I read it, and I actually liked some of it. Concerning the ideas and content trait, the point is this:

Many writing approaches are based on the notion that children’s brains are filled with “original” thoughts and that they should have a desire or ability to write these insights down on paper. However, a careful observation of children completely contradicts these ideas. Most children who do write easily will first use facts they have read or been taught . . .

Those children who can, without much assistance, easily create content that is “clear, focused, anecdotal, insightful and purposeful” (criteria from the 6 Traits) almost always use ideas and information that they have read recently, read a lot about because of a strong interest, or have written about previously.

There is nothing wrong with having students write primarily as a response tool, or in a reporting manner, which are the styles I demand most frequently. Usually, these occasions give students something to say, because content is involved. Style, voice, and fluency still come into play in such genres, and I find that I can help their writing better when they have content to convey than when they are saying something silly like, “My craziest experience in a restaurant or shopping mall.”

The idea was reinforced when I read Will Fitzhugh’s article, “Where’s the Content?” from an Educational Leadership of few years back:

The very idea of writing without content takes some getting used to. I was taken aback not long ago to read the comments of a young woman who was asked how she felt about having a computer grade the essays . . . She replied that she didn’t mind, noting that the test givers were more interested in her “ability to communicate” than in what she actually said.

Although style, fluency, tone, and correct grammar are certainly important in writing, folks like me think that content has value as well. The guidelines for scoring the new writing section on the SAT seem to say otherwise, however: Readers evaluating the essays are told not to take off points for factual mistakes, and they must score the essays “holistically”—at the rate of 30 per hour (Winerip, 2005).

Fitzhugh’s article is not the final word on the subject of how to teach writing in schools, but it did give me pause. I am about to push my ninth graders to their annual essay response to The Odyssey, and for years I have assigned the topic, “Odysseus and Me,” requiring students to extend three characteristics of Odysseus to themselves. It’s been a moderately successful essay, though most of the challenge comes from including six quotes from The Odyssey to support the arguments. After reading Fitzhugh’s thoughts, I second-guessed my assignment, thinking I’d lowered the expectations a bit too far and passed up an opportunity for students to engage in the creation of real content.

I then began to change the essay and am crafting it into a grander challenge, one where I’ll have the chance to teach students more of the process of writing, of breaking down the thinking, and of looking to sources of accurate information to support their arguments. Now, the essay reads like this: “How much is Odysseus like another figure, either from history or literature?” The challenge is real, the content is meaty, and I think students are up to the task if I teach them how to do it.

I do not want my students to be good at saying nothing well. I want them to be interesting, and I want them to learn how to spot good content, content worthy of inclusion in their writing. To help them in this, it seems to me that the best way might be to challenge them to find it and to include it accurately. It might not serve them as well on The Test, but I have a hunch it will serve them better in life.

Thanks for reading.

 

Trying opening lines until one works

I’m playing with more of the exercises Aimee Buckner mentions in Notebook Know-How, and I like in particular a pair that work on introductions. The two of note she calls Grabber Leads and Try Ten. The Grabber Leads idea is similar to the analysis of writing I’d explored recently and I might end up merging her plan with my own depending on the circumstances, as hers focuses primarily upon the opening sentence rather than the entire introduction, as mine does.

The Try Ten idea is fun, however, as a particular exercise of revision. It’s a simple idea–take your opening sentence and rewrite it 10 times, using the way you have it as number one. I gave it a shot, rewriting the opening to an article I’d recently written: “Blurring the lines between education and entertainment.”

Here are my 10 ways to open the article. Which do you think is best?

1. On the way home today I stopped at the library to pick up more materials for the girls’ current unit of study, which is France, and which means my wife is attempting to broaden their minds to a realization that there is more in France than an annual bicycle race (that obsession would be my contribution—our favorite racer is Michael Cavendish).
2. The only thing my girls knew about France was that bicycles race there.
3. Ask my girls to mention everything they know about France, and they’ll tell you bikes race there. Then they’ll stop.
4. I don’t know for sure that my girls knew France was a country and not just the name of a bicycle race.
5. Education is a funny thing when you’re having fun.
6. My kids are studying France, and we went to the library to discover what happens there besides a bicycle race.
7. With the conviction that learning can be fun, I scoured the library for details about France.
8. When you don’t know anything about a topic, almost anything can be interesting.
9. The K on the imaginary KWL chart I created with my girls was fairly slim when our topic hit France: it’s the name of a bicycle race.
10. Though I had decisions to make about what books to choose for my kids to study France, I wasn’t too worried about what to pick—I knew they’d love anything.

 

Whenever I ask them to read

I have taken a lot of professional development classes, and the general idea expressed again and again that it’s not them, it’s me, has begun to drive me crazy. It is often me, I know this; not all the time, however. I can jump through hoops, create interest, generate relevancy, but at some point, I need to ask them to read a piece of text. The never fail response from a frightening portion of my students?

This position or its upright and open-eyed equivalent is a daily routine. Many I see like to blame it on the texts, but why not ask all the questions: Do any parents use curfews anymore? Do they check to see that kids go to bed? Is it too much to ask students to read something that they don’t find as stimulating as a Monster drink?

• 8:00am Class by Robert S. Donovan

 

Preparing to write: Two tricks for expanding students’ grasp of character

I participated in theatre a bit in high school, not so much that I began down the road of marked skill, but enough to appreciate it and taste the thrill. One thing I recall is how similar the work of the actor is to the work of a good reader or writer. For example, my director for the one play I was cast in during high school asked us during a rehearsal to spend some time considering our characters and what they were like beyond the text we were performing. What were their homes like? Their bedrooms? What decorated the wall? What kinds of things did they do while there? To consider these questions we were required to make firm decisions about the character traits we were portraying on stage and to extend them into an unfamiliar arena. Using details unknown to the audience, we created a detectable depth of character.

I thought of that today while working through Aimee Buckner’s book, Notebook Know-How. I am undecided whether I will implement a writer’s notebook–I tend to think it not worthwhile to make 16-year olds who know they hate writing to pretend they are writers (especially considering that they are two years away from never having to write again unless forced to). In essence, it is this idea of pretending to be a professional writer that undergirds many notebook and writing workshop strategies–hence the myriad quotes of writers on writing that we use in those contexts. Annie Dillard’s scenario comes to mind again, as it often does: the student asks, could I too could be a writer? And the writer responds, “Well, I don’t know – do you like sentences?” Many of my students most assuredly do not  like sentences, and I am not foolish enough to think that in the time we have together I will convince them otherwise.

That said, I agree with Buckner that fluency in writing is important, and I agree that a writing notebook and workshop approach is one way to improve fluency, but I don’t think it’s the only way, so my approach to Buckner is more to look to what she does and glean ideas I can use in what I do.

With all that anti-workshop attitude out in the open, I should also point out that I like the way Buckner uses the writer’s notebook. For her classes, it is not a journal or draft-book, but a book of preparation and learning of strategies and skill. Thus, today I considered with her a handful of strategies for extending a topic, and the two I most appreciated rekindled the preparation techniques I used in that high school theater.

Favorite Collection

Favorite collection is one strategy I would like to use, both in writing pieces and as a general strategy for analyzing characters presented in literature. Essentially, Buckner’s idea here is to think of the collections a museum might put together to display the essence of a topic or person. If we had to put together a collection of our favorite and most significant items for display, what would give onlookers the fullest idea of who we are? A particular time I could see using this strategy would be when I ask my 9th graders to write their “coolest person” essay, where they write about a person who is particularly great. It is not a story, though I have had them turn it into that before, but it is about a person they know, and I think it would be helpful to create a list of the things that might be memorialized in that museum space. What do the items show about that person? In the end, I could see this exercise generating lots of particular details. I think it would also be helpful for my “Odysseus and Me” essay, as they could design a collection for Odysseus and in looking at those items they would see a pattern of what Odysseus is like.

Interviews

The other strategy I would like to implement are interviews. These are particularly like the theatre strategy, as they require students to make the character talk outside the text that is being considered. Thus, interviews strike me as a helpful way of moving into uncharted areas and drawing out the things we don’t know. Through an interview question a student can easily realize what they don’t know about their character, especially if we design a batch of standard questions that we should be asking a character about him or herself. Once the lacuna is exposed, the student can address it, maybe through research, or maybe through further character development or analysis. Like with the favorites-collection, this strategy could be applied to the writing process or to literature analysis, giving it that flexibility that makes it worthwhile.

I have a note above my desk that asks me an important question: “What have you done today to improve your students’ writing?” I find that the NCLB data does not bring this question up much, and when it does, its focus is so strange as to be amusing. I therefore ask it of myself, urging myself to push my students, because even if they avoid writing for the rest of their lives, I want to ensure that the reason is initiative, not ability.

Thanks for reading.

 

Blurring the lines between education and entertainment

On the way home today I stopped at the library to pick up more materials for the girls’ current unit of study, which is France, and which means my wife is attempting to broaden their minds to a realization that there is more in France than an annual bicycle race (that obsession would be my contribution—our favorite racer is Michael Cavendish). In one book on France the girls discovered a picture of the Tour, so every time my wife attempted to turn to a new page and share something else, A– would ask to return to the page with the bicycles. What can I say, that three week study we did on bicycle racing this summer was effective (Did I just call watching a sporting event on TV a unit study?).

They’re working out of the Five in a Row series for Kindergarten/pre-school, or at least, that’s where they begin. When the topic is particularly interesting we kind of go wherever it takes us, which means, for example, the girls now know quite a bit about China, more than their dad knew when he graduated high school, anyway.

Among the things I picked up at the library was a CD for learning French. That might sound insane for a family where the oldest child is five, but the reality is that neither of us parents could speak the language, so we needed to a CD to expose our children to the accent. I cannot express how sorry this situation is. I took four years of high school French and I have to buy a CD for my children simply to hear a few basic phrases and an accent. I am a pitiful man.

Before dinner E– began showing me what she’d read earlier in the day about Paris, and then I asked her if she wanted to hear French a bit. We popped the CD in the stereo and E bounced around the living room repeating every few words the folks on tracks said while A laid on the floor flipping through a children’s book about the Palace of Versailles. While brushing teeth tonight E and I played French, telling each other “Bon jour! Comment ca va?” and “Ca va bien!”

A beautiful thing about educating your children at home—a beauty that our home schooling friends with older children also affirm—is that the line between entertainment and education is rather blurred. Not that our children will always have these hyperbolically eager attitudes about learning (When does it generally wear off—7^th grade?), but by filling our lives with learning, and by making learning our lifestyle rather than our 8-4 obligation, the jaded edge does not seem to develop as easily or as hard.

In my classroom, my students generally wear that edge, and how I can plane it off even a hair is a question I am asking but cannot answer. At this point, my main attempt is to blur that line between entertainment and education, between normal conversation and learning, as much as I can, thinking that somehow we might discover that learning is better suited to be a lifestyle than a duty. I don’t know that it’s possible—there are some mighty big obstacles out there—but I’ll give it a shot anyway. It’s another one of these areas where it’s the best thing for my own children, so why can’t I bring it to the classroom for other people’s children?

We’ll see.

Thanks for reading.

 

Becoming better writers with professional help

I recently read an article from Ruth Beechick in The Old Schoolhouse, a homeschooling magazine. I enjoy Beechick, though I admit that my familiarity with her is mostly from perusing in random spots the books that my wife is reading.

The thing I’ve discovered is that Beechick has a refreshing take on language arts, a take I need after five years of immersion in professional development coursework. For example, in this article I was reading she talks about the structure of essays and points out quite concretely what I have babbled around in the past: that though educators often teach solid structures for essay construction, writers do not follow the formats with any sense of loyalty.

Her suggestion for homeschoolers is to head to the newspapers and other sources of writing and study the structure of the writing there. See how writers open articles, how they develop arguments, and how they wrap things up. Find the patterns worth imitating, and then attempt to incorporate them into your own writing.

That’s good advice and I can easily see leading my children in such a sincere pursuit. In fact, I can hardly wait to do this with my children. We can pick up a magazine, an article one of us has read, or any book in the house, and read it as writers and editors. The amusing part of it to me is how obvious it is. After all, that is how I learn to write better: I read many writers and latch onto particular methods and techniques. This is why I have said I would love to be E.B. White, and why I often present the writing of people like Annie Dillard to my students as a model of great writing. Yet in my work with students I think I often miss a strength of Beechick’s strategy: quantity. In looking at lots of writing, a student conducts a kind of meta-analysis and discovers the real patterns. Seeing lots of patterns can help a student discover how one trick works here and another trick works there. Too often what I do is to show students one great trick, a trick they may not be able to imitate, changing little for them.

The advantages to students of learning Beechick’s way are overwhelming. In evaluating professional writers, the student has read attentively and eventually learns to see that which she may not have seen before. The trained eye knows what to see. With writing, an exercise like this helps the student develop that trained eye, and she can read with a new perspective. Additionally, she increases her ability to view her own writing the same way—critically and precisely.

The analogy that pops into my head immediately is from my watching of the school’s football team last night. I never played football, so I do not understand many of the intricacies of the game, even though I have watched plenty on TV and know the basics. Last night, in overtime, the opponent ran for a touchdown but had it called back due to a holding penalty. I never saw the hold and had actually begun to shake my head with disappointment when I realized the man behind me was loudly informing the referee about some action on the field: “Holding!” The ref must have heard, because no one was celebrating and a few of the men in zebra-shirts were conferring. As I stood there waiting, I thought about what I had seen on the play. I had been watching in particular a linebacker I knew running awkwardly and flailing his arms. I had laughed at it even as the play continued, thinking how goofy he looked, but I never realized what I’d seen. This afternoon I had that linebacker’s brother in class and asked if he’d been the one who had been held: “Oh yeah, that guy was totally grabbing him. It was blatant.” Blatant for one who understood what he was seeing, but for one who is not an expert in the finer points of the game, it was invisible. I was looking right at it and never saw it.

The trouble for me is that I still want to bring some of this ideal education my wife and I plan to provide to our own children to my students in the public school classroom. Thus, after reading Beechick, I was stuck ruminating how to implement something similar on a grand scale. How can I guide classes of 25 students through close examination of professional writing?

I figured a good place to start would be with a glaring weak spot of most students’ writing: introductions. We can look at piles of articles and analyze their introductions to help realize what an introduction does and how one can begin with something other than a question or the thesis statement. While with my own children we can simply head to the computer together and find an article that interests them, I am not so naïve with a classroom full of cherubs. Few things could waste our precious class time more effectively than a fuzzy request to roam around the Internet.

Thus, today during my planning period I spent an hour browsing the most-read and most-emailed articles from the New York Times, Slate, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and even ESPN. I haven’t read all the articles in full, but I have read the introductions, and they all begin with something that grabs one’s attention and then at some point tells us what their point is before moving on to the rest of the article. I’ll probably have each student read at least a half dozen of these articles and fill out an analysis of each one in a table I’ll have designed (I envision a column for categorizing the attention grabber’s strategy, a place to write the thesis statement, and a box or two to describe what they felt was strong or weak about the writing). They’ll confer together, we’ll discuss the results, and then we’ll attempt to write our own introductions, probably to an introduction-less article that I’ll supply.

I won’t have the time to sit with each student and detect whether he or she has begun to see the structure supporting the articles, but I’ll create the exercise nonetheless. Ultimately, the attempt is driven by this conviction: the method strikes me as the best approach for my own children, so I don’t see any reason to attempt less with other people’s kids.

Thanks for reading.

 

After weeks of preparation, Ninehub turns to blogging

I signed up for a Ninehub Moodle account last spring, thrilled that someone was willing to host a free Moodle class online. I was so thoroughly impressed with Moodle when I used it that I began to concoct plans for turning all the professional development work I lead in the district into distance courses.

Then the whole Ninehub thing seemed to crash over the summer and I couldn’t get back to any of my stuff, which I hadn’t had time to back up yet (I hadn’t done that much so it wasn’t the end of the world). I’ve contacted the administrators but still have received no reason to hope that I’ll be able to access the class I created, and at this point, really, why would I want to access it?

Either way, here’s what I find amusing. I received an email today from Ninehub inviting me to use their new educational blogging service, called Eduperience. I’m naturally tempted by anything of the kind, since I’ve quit using Edublogs in the classroom (too slow, too unreliable, and too full of obnoxious and misleading advertisements), but the email invite sounds like it came from that guy who found my only remaining relative in Zimbabwe–the one with $150,000 for me if I’ll advance him $20,000 for lawyer fees:

After weeks of preparation, we are ready to introduce Eduperience.com – an easy blogging tools for teachers and students. . . . We always obsessed to provide useful tools for educators, therefore If you have any comments or anything we can improve, please let us know.

As impressed as I was by weeks of preparation, I followed the link, and my favorite part of the site is where they ask me this:

For today, I have seen enough, but I’m not sure I’m ready to check out, thanks.

Years ago I would have thrown caution to the wind and signed a class up for blogs here, desperate for anything that would work for blogging in the classroom, even if the providers don’t know a thing about the English language. With a lot of help from unreliable blog providers and scant computer resources for students, however, I’ve moved past that stage, and my taste for risk is going down. I don’t have the energy to devote to ventures that can’t figure out capital letters or transitive verbs. It may be a snooty response, but I’m an English teacher. If I don’t have high standards here, who will?