Tag: writing

Classy: A student’s vignette

As I wrote before, my G11 students are writing their autobiographies of their reading lives as vignettes. Semaj turned in the rough draft below and said I could share it. It’s a lovely thing.

My First Love

I can remember the first time I fell in love. His cover was smooth and smelled like the words had been freshly printed onto the page, the bind was crisp and hadn’t been broken. “The Pinballs” was neatly and evenly typed across the cover in big yellow letters. I knew I had to get used to the image of those words for that would be all I would see for the next couple of days. I learned to love his flaws, the way he randomly stopped starting a new chapter breaking the flow of our connection, or the way he told me just enough to leave me hanging but not enough to give me what I wanted in that moment. But I loved him. I stayed up with him every night and held him close to me everywhere I went.

We were inseparable – me and him.

I stayed up past curfew for him, hiding my face under the blankets using the light from my phone to illuminate up the words on the page. We were only together for 3 days. Three days is all it took for him to steal my heart. Three days is all it took for me to fall in love with him. When our time together had come to an end, I shed my first and last tear in honor of him and the characters we had met and had become a part of over those 3 days.

I will never forget my first love. I will never love another the way I loved him, because he was my first. He made me realize, although I may never love another the way I loved him, there are other out there worth loving . I will always love my first book.

Things I Know 93 of 365: I should do as I ask students to do

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.

– Oscar Wilde

I laid across a bean bag chair in my room today trying to conjure up a memory.

My G11 students are writing reader autobiographies as their quarter three benchmark projects. The assignment calls for them to write from 7 to 15 vignettes inspired by moments of their readerly lives.

As it’s been a while since I’ve written a vignette, I committed to completing the assignment as well.

Thus, I was sprawled on a red pleather bean bag at the end of the day.

My first vignette was about the brown leather recliner in my grandparents’ living room. It was the chair where my grandfather would read to me before bedtime when I was little.

I tried to pull that memory to me through the years and carefully mold it back together on the screen. I attempted to make it something someone would want to read.

As I was typing, one of my students, Luna, was in the multi-colored bean bag opposite me. Having difficulty framing her first vignette as a single literary photograph because it took place over a stretch of time, Luna kept asking me to look over what she was writing.

Her vignette detailed a span of her middle school years and I offered suggestions and feedback a few times as she was composing.

After each piece of feedback, I returned to my writing, attempting to convey the image of footy-pajamaed me learning to sight read as my grampa read “just one more book.”

Finally, toward the end of the class period, I got it where I wanted it. Well, I got it as close to where I wanted it as I could hope of a first draft.

I had that feeling of one who has created – that need to share.

And so, I turned to Luna and handed her my laptop. I didn’t say anything or preface her reading with any comments. I handed her my laptop and asked her to read.

I’ve had students read pieces of my writing before. I’ve shared journal entries. This was different. I’d written a memory in all its first-draft roughness and turned and shared it with my student.

If I had to guess, I’d say the vulnerability in that moment is close to the vulnerability my students feel each time they submit a piece of work in class. For that reason, I’m glad I’ll be writing my remaining vignettes and submitting them to my students.

I should be doing more of that. While grading, planning and the rest of being a teacher often prevents me from completing every assignment I ask of my students, crafting these moments and embracing the vulnerability of sharing them with my students is a stiff reminder of the openness I ask of my students each time I ask them to write or share in class. It’s a reminder I’ll use next time I’m tempted to breeze through a stack of assignments for grading.

If I’m going to ask them to share their ideas with me, I need to remember (and experience) all the rawness inherent in that sharing.

Things I Know 87 of 365: Pres. Obama, Rhee, Gates and Sec. Duncan should support the NWP

So our goal as an administration, my goal as President, has been to build on these successes across America…

…We need to put outstanding teachers in every classroom, and give those teachers the pay and the support that they deserve…

…A budget that sacrifices our commitment to education would be a budget that’s sacrificing our country’s future.  That would be a budget that sacrifices our children’s future.  And I will not let it happen…

…Let me make it plain:  We cannot cut education.  (Applause.)  We can’t cut the things that will make America more competitive…

– Pres. Obama 3/14/11 Kenmore Middle School, Arlington, VA

We’ll fight against ineffective instructional programs and bureaucracy so that public dollars go where they make the biggest difference: to effective instructional programs.

– Michelle Rhee 12/6/10 Newsweek

Great teachers are a precious natural resource. But we have to figure out how to make them a renewable, expandable resource. We have to figure out what makes the great teachers great and how we transfer those skills to others. These are vital questions for American education.

– Bill Gates 11/19/10 Council of Chief State School Officers

The plain fact is that — to lead in the new century — we have no choice in the matter but to invest in education. No other issue is more critical to our economy, to our future and our way of life.

– Sec. Arne Duncan 3/9/11 Senate Testimony

For 20 years, the National Writing Project has received federal funding to help teachers across the nation improve their practice and improve the learning of their students. The research bears this out.

The NWP is in danger. Twenty years of success and grass-roots professional development are in danger. Contact your congressperson – daily. After that, contact the offices of each of the people quoted above. If they truly believe what they say above, they will have no problem speaking out in support of the NWP.

Classy: Using social media to tell stories…real stories

I wrote a while ago about the stories my seniors are writing in our storytelling class. Each randomly drew one of Aristotle’s identified human emotions from a hat and was asked to let that emotion inspire a short story.

A few days later, the students partnered with one another with the goal of getting to know each other’s protagonists.

“What’s the name of one of your characters?” was the starting question. From there, the sky was the limit. They inquired about the characters’ favorite colors, their histories with their parents, what kind of students they were in middle school, their appearances – anything.

As partners questioned, they took notes on the answers. Those notes were handed over to the writers when the interviews were over as reminders of whom they were writing about. The activity proved informative.

“I’ve never really thought about who a character was before a story I was writing.”

“This makes me feel like I know the character, like she’s real.”

That’s the idea.

Then they wrote.

And wrote.

And wrote.

Last week, we read Atlantic Senior Editor Alexis Madrigal’s story outing Chicagoan Dan Singer as the man behind the twitory of @MayorEmanuel.

We discussed the idea that an entirely new genre of literature (or several) was being created in our lifetimes. Story was being transformed.

As it’s a storytelling class guided in part by the essential question, “How does the way we tell stories affect those stories,” it seemed a good idea to try our hands at these new genres.

Enter the project.

Description: Taking the story you wrote based off of one of Aristotle’s identified emotions, plot the timeline of your story, select the tool or tools you’ll want to use and tell your story in real time. Think of it as a mix of 24 and @MayorEmanuel.

I informally launched it Friday as an idea I’d been playing around with. Nothing formal. Just words in a conversation.

Monday, I handed out project descriptions and we started building. Today, we collaborated on the rubric.

Any online tool is fair game – Facebook, tumblr, twitter, youtube, anything.

In traditional arts and letters, we have fiction and nonfiction with the line blurring from time to time.

If everything can be read as a text and if the more traditional texts are moving online, is anything inherently nonfiction?

Some of what they’re writing violates user agreements. I don’t feel badly about that. If Mark Zuckerberg can play in my backyard, I can play in his.

One student has solicited his friends to also build character profiles to improvisationally interact with his protagonist and the events of the narrative. Other students have created public profiles on Facebook for their characters’ public thoughts and anonymous tumblr accounts for those same characters’ private thoughts. Anyone with both links will have the whole story, but either link will provide a different narrative.

Differing from Singer, we built blueprints and timelines for these stories. As I checked them in today, the students explained how they’d begun posting as exposition already.

Thursday I received a friend request on ‘Book from someone named Kwadwo Watcher. A few minutes later, I received the message below.

Another character started following me on twitter. A few students’ characters are following and friending one another with plans for intertextual cross-pollination.

All signs are pointing to the probability that this will be an interesting project.

Things I Know 78 of 365: I Blog4NWP

As of write now, the country will shut down April 8.

Unless Congress can write the ship of the federal budget to the degree that both bickering parties can stand back and say, “That’s alwrite,” then write at the stroke of midnight the federal government will be write back where it was in 1995.

Though some clearly partisan issues lurk in the spending of the federal government, some issues belong neither to the left nor the write.

Some issues transcend.

As I’ve said before, the National Writing Project is one of those issues. Never, ever before has the country benefited from such a grassroots network of professional development that has consistently been proven to improve student learning and teacher performance.

In an educational climate where we are to be racing to the top, I’m certain of one thing, the National Writing Project has already been to the top and circled back to help the rest of us get there.

Name a metric of programatic success and the NWP will impress you. Worried about fiduciary inefficiency? Don’t look at the NWP, almost 100 percent of its federal funding is matched at its more than 200 sites by local dollars.

Or, it was.

March 2, President Obama signed a bill eliminating direct federal funding for the National Writing Project.

According to a statement by NWP Executive Director Sharon J. Washington:

National Writing Project teachers provide more than 7,000 professional development activities annually, reaching 130,000 educators, and through them, 1.4 million students. These programs are designed locally to meet the specific needs of the students, teachers, and communities served. The loss of the National Writing Project will have an immediate impact on teachers and students across the country.

I am ashamed of a congress and president that would tout the importance of education and the need for preparing our students for the future and then eliminate funding to a program that has done nothing but good for over three decades.

We will enact laws to accommodate the wills of billionaire philanthropists as they try this and then that approach to education as though all it takes to inspire learning is pushing the write button in the Wonkavator, but we will not support the work of a network of teachers across the country to continue on with what is a golden ticket of an approach to improving teaching and learning.

I am saddened and ashamed.

And, tomorrow, I’ll be calling my congressmen – again.

Things I Know 71 of 365: Writing can be so much more

For a while now, I’ve been following @IAM_SHAKESPEARE on twitter. The idea behind the account appealed to me – tweeting every work of Shakespeare, line-by-line.

I’m fairly certain I was teaching my Shakespeare class at the time and all juiced up on The Bard.

Initially, Shakespeare was following me too. Not anymore. The realization that my writing had lost his attention, faux or otherwise, was a bit of a blow to the ego.

Then again, I’m struggling to remain interested in what cyber-Bill has to say. Every now and again, I’ll catch a key line from a work I’ve read and feel the self satisfaction of recognition. Most of the time, though, I’ll see something like the recent, “Farewell. Our countrymen are gone and fled.” I’m not sure what to do with that.

The narrative wasn’t built for Twitter.

This is not to say Twitter wasn’t built for narrative.

Most recently, the exploits of the fictitious Rahm Emanuel, @MayorEmanuel, have shown the medium can do more than answer its initial question of “What are you doing?”

As revealed in a recent story from The Atlantic, Chicago writer/professor/punk zine publisher Dan Sinker used the account to build an entire world for what could be described as his Nega Emanuel.

In his analysis of Sinker’s work, Atlantic Senior Editor Alexis Madrigal writes:

When you try to turn his adventures into traditional short stories or poems, they lose the crucial element of time. The episode where the mayor gets stuck in the sewer pipes of City Hall just does not work when the 15 tweets aren’t spaced out over 7 hours. It’s all over too fast to be satisfying. There’s no suspense.

This is 4-D storytelling, and I’m fascinated.

@MayorEmanuel existed as a stand-alone narrative with no tie-in or marketing behind it.

In the lead up to the 2000 release of the film adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, fans could receive e-mails from the film’s main character Patrick Bateman. It was 2000 and e-mail was still super cool. I was working at my university’s student paper at the time and remember the daily discussions as the e-mails arrived in our movie columnist’s inbox.

I’d read epistolic fiction before, but this was something new. It was sent out at the author’s pace, not the readers’. As Madrigal pointed out, suspense was built as a function of how the story was told.

The seniors in my Storytelling class are writing short stories now influenced by one of the human emotions as described by Aristotle. They’re crafting stories the way generations before them have composed texts. Though they’ve moved from paper to the screen, the process and the format are largely the same. I see and understand the value of the exercise. There’s a holding on to the roots and the tradition of writing stories (and I love Fiddler on the Roof as much as the next guy).

At the same time, Singer won’t be the last person to bend Twitter or any other social network to his will. I’ll be remiss in my duties if I don’t offer up these online spaces as playgrounds for the telling of the stories my students are writing.

It’s incredibly simple to ask them to write stories and post them to class blogs. They’re already doing it here and here.

Only doing that, though, would be tantamount to art teachers forbidding their students to use perspective in their painting. Story can have a depth and breadth to it online far beyond the linear nature of the page – be it paper or web.

The future of writing and literature has too many possibilities for me to force them to write in the past.

I’ve begun thinking of ways to encourage my students to start playing with new media as mechanisms for delivering their stories. One of the essential questions for the class asks, “How is a story affected by how it’s told?” The answer to that appears to be shifting before our eyes.

Things I Know 33 of 365: These are not my secret thoughts

Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think, whatever you want, be sure that it is what you want, whatever you feel, be sure that it is what you feel.

– T.S. Eliot

February 4, 1994 I started keeping a journal.

In between moves a few years ago, it was uncovered. I pulled it from a box in my basement thinking I’d include an entry as part of this writing.

I can’t.

I can’t betray my own trust.

Twelve-year-old me wrote those pages for the posterity of us. They serve as an anchor to memories of past love, broken friendships, broken families, personal successes.

Most of all, those entries were where I was trying to figure out new ideas I’d stumbled upon or had thrust upon my brain.

Reading the entries, I can see the genesis of some of the ideas I consider at the core of who I am today. Those nascent ideas are between me and myself. Some of their more recent iterations, though, have found their way to publication. Some are still in the thought lab.

While I was keeping that journal, I was also a contributor to the student section of my local paper. Before media became social, the State Journal-Register created a space for young writers to document the world as it appeared to them and share it with our community. I wrote about ideas about which I was more confident – school lunches, music, that time a mouse got into my bedroom.

I started to find my public voice in those pages.

I still keep a journal.

This is not it.

It is worn, has been dumped in the Colorado River and stolen by a baboon. My journal holds the lint of my days and the figments of stray thoughts. I note the world and my questions about it. My opinions start there. Like the first journal 15 years ago, it holds my secret thoughts.

This is a different space.

Here, I place the thoughts I’ve played with. I’ve pushed and pulled them and shared them with those I trust to do the same.

By the time I’ve written them here, I’ve already argued against the thoughts I publish. They’re the fourth or fifth or seventeenth drafts.

Online writing should be that. It should never be the space my brain vomits with hopes the Internet custodians will clean it up.

My worry over digital footprints extends beyond avoiding embarrassing pictures of myself online. It covers embarrassing or incomplete thinking online as well.

As I write myself into existence, I work to make it the better version of myself.

Things I Know 20 of 365: If I’d “taught” him, I’d have broken him

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

– Albert Einstein

We were playing with outlining today.

Rather than peddle the same kind of linear thinking Mrs. Rupple taught me in 7th grade, I tried a different approach.

“What are some ways you’ve planned your writing that have been successful?”

And then they shared.

“Write these down,” said I, “You might need them when you get stuck.”

The old favorites such as Roman numerals and webs and bullet points were offered up.

They weren’t alone.

One student talked about coming up with a topic, journaling about it and then moving the pieces around until they made sense. Where she sensed weakness, she knew she needed to do research.

Another student picks a topic, starts researching and tags the useful articles in delicious. When tagging, he lists the important points he wants to reference in his paper as bullet points in the notes section of the tag. When it’s time to write, he calls up the tag and has all his notes listed.

Then there was Andre.

He didn’t know it, but Andre was the inspiration for today’s lesson.

Yesterday, as the students were preparing the information they’d uncovered from their research, Andre spoke up.

“Mr. Chase, yo, I don’t do outlining. That’s not how I think.”

“How do you plan your writing?”

“I see it in pictures.”

He explained it to the class today:

  1. Pick a topic. (effects of integration on minorities)
  2. Picture the topic. (historically black towns)
  3. Zoom in on the picture. (citizens of those towns of different classes interacting)
  4. Picture how things change with outside influences. (black citizens with wealth moved closer to white citizens of wealth and separated from their previous communities)
  5. Cut to the effects of the change. (citizens without wealth suffered because the community structure had been compromised)

And that is his process.

It works for him. More to the point, it’s how his brain works for him.

I could never have taught Andre this method.

More frightening, if I’d attempted to teach Andre outlining, my method would have worked against everything his brain was telling him.

“What about when you need to find outside sources to back up your arguments?” asked I.

Easy. He does an image search using the keywords from his topic. When he finds a picture that appears to fit the bill, he goes to the source page and reads the related information.

It’s not how my brain works.

It’s how Andre’s brain works.

It works well.

I’m so glad I asked.

Classy: Communal notes in gDocs

As I’ve written, Google Apps for Education is truly changing my practice this year.

We’re studying Jung’s idea of archetypes as they pertain to literature in my Sexuality & Society in Literature class. For an introduction, today, we read a simple introduction.

While the students were reading, I took my notes on key information and put them in a new gDoc.

On the side, I included comments on the ideas found in the notes. (We’ve been working on summarizing before offering up commentary.)

When the class was done reading, I had them close their computers and share their initial thinking on the ideas from the write-up. It was slow going. One of those moments where I can see the bigger picture and am thereby inherently more excited about the ideas we’re investigating.

When it felt like the conversation had reached critical mass, I moved to the screen and pulled up my gDoc of notes.

I pointed out that I’d included the title of the article (linked to the original text), author information, my name and notes on the key ideas, and notes containing my thinking and questions.

From there, I set them free to find more information with the directive of “build notes about archetypes in literature that work to answer our questions.”

The link to the editable gDoc was posted on the class moodle page. They logged in and started building notes.

As they built, I asked questions via the commenting tool to prod their individual investigation.

In the doc’s chat sidebar, I asked questions of the entire class to make sure our notes took on greater breadth.

Soon, the class will be writing essays with the help of their notes. Because of what they’re building, they’ll have the benefit of many minds as points of reference.

Next semester, when I’m teaching Storytelling, I’ll be able to produce the gDoc to introduce archetypes in conjunction with The Hero’s Journey.

Here’s what I didn’t do:

  • I didn’t build a wiki. I’m not interested in worrying about architecture, and a wiki would have required more click-throughs than seemed logical.
  • I didn’t have them blog. Though I’m making the work public here, the notes were meant for in-class use. Additionally, I wanted everything to live in the same place. While a common tag would have allowed the gathering of the posts, it wouldn’t serve the purpose of notes.
  • I didn’t use a discussion forum. The goal was putting the information in one place and allowing for the common culling of ideas. A discussion forum would have, again, required clicks. As the ideas within the students’ courses found connections at different points, threading discussion would have limited the intertextual connectivity of the reading.
  • I didn’t use guided notes. With the goal of exploration and investigation of dynamic concepts, guided notes would have put the onus on me and prevented one student’s uncovering of the periodic table of archetypes.

Though not perfected, this approach will be one I take again.

Classy: Journaling with choice

Having kids write is important.
Shocking, right?
According to a April 2008 report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “Eighty-six percent of teens believe good writing is important to success in life — some 56% describe it as essential and another 30% describe it as important.”
It’s nice when the kids are on our side.
Parents are on our side as well –  “Eighty-six percent of teens believe good writing is important to success in life — some 56% describe it as essential and another 30% describe it as important.”
Unfortunately, the kids say our writing instruction is not alright.
“Overall, 82% of teens feel that additional in-class writing time would improve their writing abilities and 78% feel the same way about their teachers using computer-based writing tools.”
I’m trying to work on this.
Aside from the various “bigger” writing projects I ask of students, I’m a huge proponent of journaling.
My journaling practice has evolved over time. It started as I was taught to journal by Mrs. Haake; a prompt was on the board and they responded to it.
Turns out, the tools at my disposal give me more options.
Here are the frequent options:

  • Use the picture for inspiration (always an image pulled from creative commons-licensed flickr archives).
  • Listen to the song on repeat for inspiration (generally connected, at least tacitly, to whatever we’re reading or discussing in class).
  • Watch this video (a few times) and respond.
  • Respond to this quotation.
  • Free write.

Variations, of course, exist.
The last option is universally on the table. My students come to me from somewhere. It’s easy to forget.
Allowing freewriting allows them to unpack whatever they carry with them into the room.
Journaling can be drawing, journaling can be poetry, journaling can be lists.
The rules:

  1. Write.
  2. Don’t think.
  3. Write.

I don’t read the journals. Scratch that, I don’t make sharing journal entries compulsory. If a student wants to, he or she leaves his journal in a designated location and I read only the last entry. I promise them that’s all I’ll read. If they trust me, they’ll share. If they don’t, they won’t. If they don’t, I work harder.
Here is today’s prompt:

One final finding:

Teens who enjoy their school writing more are more likely to engage in creative writing at school compared with teens who report very little enjoyment of school writing (81% vs. 69%). In our focus groups, teens report being motivated to write by relevant, interesting, self-selected topics, and attention and feedback from engaged adults who challenged them.

So, choice, relevance and discussion. Shocking, right?