Read. Analyze. Emulate

During our break from school as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, my two boys and I have been using our morning to complete reading and writing prompts.  Yesterday, we pulled our inspiration from George Ella Lyon's poem "Kitchen Table."

In an activity similar to one I do with my high school students, I asked my boys to read the excerpt, analyze the moves that the writer makes, and emulate the style in an original work of their own. Last year while attending the Michigan Reading Association conference, Penny Kittle engaged us in a very similar activity using an excerpt from Alice Hoffman's book Faithful. In using a small excerpt from a piece of writing, students of any age are able to engage in analysis and bring those writing craft moves into their own work.  Using shorter excerpts from a variety of texts gives emerging writers the opportunity to play with their writing. 

In yesterday's activity, my 9 and 11 year old boys talked about repetition, imagery, and shifts in tone. These are the same concepts that my high school writers were unpacking in their rhetorical analysis of a variety of speeches just prior to our break. My high school students were tasked not only with analyzing a selected speech, but using their analysis to craft their own speech. This is what it means to use a text as a mentor. What can we learn from writers about the craft of writing? 

The result of our writing endeavors yesterday with my boys were poems about our living room furniture.

By H. Ward

This chair stands where
no chair has stood,
where I have read for
hours on end,
where my father
plays guitar,
where my dog frequently
jumps up to play.
A place of comfort,
learning,
and fun,
where I sit
still,
watching
from the green
chair.

By L. Ward

This end table is where 

coffee sits in a cup,
where Mary sleeps under,
where my dad read
the New York Times,
where my mom
grades her students'
papers
and where I wrote
this poem about the
end table.





By Jennifer Ward

This coffee table stands where
a folding chair first sat when
we moved into this space.
Months later I jigsawed
this table into the Prius,
seats folded down, the two
boys buckled into the front
passenger seat, giggling as
this table bounced between us.
This is the table where we gather to play
Munchkins, Exploding Kittens, Pandemic,
where dad used the wax
from his bees to polish
out coffee cup rings that
left O’s in the grain.
This is the table where
we lean into computer screens
to chat with friends while
sheltering inside during the pandemic,
where we would rather be gathered
together in person
laughing, chatting, playing music
as we had in the past.

Thinking about Revision

With this gift of time as we are sequestered away in our separate homes, I've been dipping back into my writing, rereading cringe-worthy drafts of poems and half-finished stories. Whew! I need to spend some time revising!

Writing is never finished. Walt Whitman rewrote Leaves of Grass five times. Former poet laureate Galway Kinnell never seemed to deliver his published poems the same way twice, omitting and adding lines even after the poems were bound in a book.  I’ve heard both author James McBride and poet Naomi Shihab Nye talk about writing as rewriting. Naomi Shihab Nye said: “If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a broken-down car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn’t realize the teacher was saying, ‘Make it shine. It’s worth it.’ Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It’s a new vision of something. It means you don’t have to be perfect the first time. What a relief!”



In thinking about how I go about revising my own writing and how I teach revision to my high school students, I notice a divide. And actually, in rereading some of my posts on this space, this divide is something that I have been struggling to bridge for a large portion of my teaching career. How do I help students invest more time in their revision process? This is going to sound weird, but our current break from traditional school as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has actually provided me some insight into revision. Let me explain.

My youngest son, Lukas, is nine years old.  This past week was our first week home together as schools shut down in Michigan as a result of the spread of the novel coronavirus. On Monday and Wednesday, his teachers posted links to math worksheets and online resources for his class to access.  He was assigned reading homework, encouraged to complete a creative book report, and asked by his teacher to complete and send back work that he had missed due to a recent orthodontist appointment.  But what did Lukas want to do?  He wanted to grab the Chromebook every chance he could so that he could add to the collaborative story that he and his buddy were writing titled "Where the Dragons Dwell."

You need to understand that when I ask Lukas about writing, he tells me that he hates it. "I hate my writer's notebook!" he complains each Wednesday night.  His weekly writing pages are typically due on Thursday morning, and of course, as an English teacher, hearing him say this each week breaks my heart. But here's the thing, I know why he's saying this. I love that his teacher has students writing in notebooks each week.  I also know that my son doesn't actually hate writing.  He, in fact, continues to write more than he is assigned when he is given free choice on what to write.  What he hates is that the feedback he has received is that he needs to fill the page and not slant his writing so that his last few lines on the page only cover 1/3 of the available space on the page. He dislikes the feedback that is focused on what his writing looks like and not on what he elects to write about. This is not feedback on the content of his writing. He enjoys writing, writing so quickly that it is a bit difficult to decipher at times, but he doesn't like when feedback interrupts his work or when it is not connected to the work. In cases when he's received feedback that he needs to write more because he doesn't "fully fill the page," he protests.  He claims he hates writing and doesn't understand why he has to do it. This is also what he said when I asked him to grab a notebook so that we could write at home together this past Monday.  However, later that same afternoon when his buddy shared a Google doc with the start of a story, Lukas didn't want to put down his writing.

Over the course of this past week, Lukas has added to the story, read the story aloud to his older brother a few times to get some advice, talked through most of our meal times about the progression of the story, always focused on how to make the story better.  This is what revision should look like. What it doesn't look like is a worksheet or a series of required comments left on a partner's draft. What it doesn't look like is everyone working on the same "step" of writing at the same time. So when we do return to school, I have some ideas about how engage students in the revision process differently.  It starts even before we begin drafting.

If writing is rewriting as McBride and Nye suggest, then conversations with students about revision strategies need to begin at the introduction of each new writing assignment.  Very few published writers complete a full draft before making a tweak here or there. We revise as we go, so we cannot leave a peer-revision workshop as the last step before our students turn in a writing assignment. We must teach students to engage in revision as we go, at each step of the writing process.  Moving forward in my own classroom, this will look more like the writing workshop model with students working in small groups to draft, craft, and revise. No more revision checklists or peer revision worksheets.  Instead, revision needs to look and feel more organic, like my son's process of crafting the collaborative story with his friend.  They use the online document to add to the writing, comments to make suggestions or ask questions of one another, and the chat to talk about where they are headed in the story.  Late this past week, my son hopped on a virtual chat with his friend, and I listened in as the two talked about the upcoming chapters they wanted to write together.  This conferencing got both boys engaged in the writing and revision process. 

I use writing conferences in my high school English classes now, but typically they are conversations between the student writer and the teacher and are left toward the end of the writing process. Using my son's writing process as a model, I see that I need to help students establish similar collaborative writing relationships much earlier in the drafting process.  Connecting my students writers and giving them space to organically talk about their writing and their struggles will do more to help them grow in their confidence as writers. Moving forward, I need to help my students establish trusted writing partners, peers that they can rely on throughout their writing practice, much like my Lukas relies on his writing buddy. 

I'll rely on the work of educators like Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher to guide me as I think about how to reframe writing assignments in my classes.  Having the opportunity to hear them talk about their work and book 180 Days last spring at the Michigan Reading Association conference was powerful.  And I would love to hear from other educators about your successes when in comes to engaging students in the revision process. 

The Connection between Innovation and Ignorance

It's the first day of March, and in addition to being the start of our March Book Madness challenge, it also marks the start of the month long blogging challenge hosted by Two Writing Teachers.  The Slice of Life (#sol17) blogging challenge is in its tenth year and invites bloggers of all ages to share a small slice of their day.  Why a small slice?  As author and educator Ralph Fletcher writes, "The bigger the issue, the smaller you write," with the idea being that our voice becomes clear when we focus on a unique, peculiar detail. "Put forth the raw evidence, and trust that the reader will understand exactly what you are getting at."

In the midst of my second hour class, my tenth grade students working to peer revise their multi-genre writing projects, I received "the call." You know, the one that every parent dreads.  My son's elementary school was calling to let me know that he was sick at school. And so the scramble began to find subs and make arrangements to go pick him up.

That's how I found myself snuggled next to him near the fireplace watching TED talks this afternoon when we both should have been sitting in our respective classrooms. He would pick a talk, and then I would. I selected Sisonke Msimang's talk titled "If a story moves you, act on it," and my son picked Sam Kass's "Want kids to learn well? Feed them well." As we scrolled through the TED site, my son saw the picture and title for Alejandro Sanchez Alvarado's talk titled "To solve old problems, study new species." Mom, we have to watch this one! What is that even a picture of?! And by the time we got just a few minutes into the talk both of us were hooked, especially when Alvarado declares: "...if you don't feel like a complete idiot most of the time, you're just not sciencing hard enough."

Alvarado calls his audience to run toward ignorance: "We actually need to bring all of our intelligence to becoming stupid again - clueless before the immensity of the unknown. Because after all, science is not really about knowledge. Science is about ignorance. That's what we do."  Both my son and I loved this. His warm head resting on my arm, my son whispered, "We have to be detectives." And he's right.

Alejandro Sanchez Alcarado ends his speech saying, "We scientists need to teach our students to long for the endless immensity of the sea that is our ignorance."  I couldn't agree more.  Innovation will emerge from our ignorance.  We must teach our students to be comfortable with the unknown, to dwell in it, to question it, and propose interpretations and solutions.  Innovation comes from inquiry into our own ignorance.  Our students need more opportunities to develop their own lines of inquiry, and this means that teachers must be comfortable with being uncomfortable, with not having all the answers.  Because, to adapt the old adage, if we teach as we have always taught, students will only ever learn what they have always learned. That is not innovation. That is just tradition.

We, students and teachers, need to recognize the potential that lies in our own ignorance. It is our opportunity for innovation.

One Word for 2017: RESONATE

At the start of the new year, even though school was not yet back in session, my student editors and I kicked off our literary magazine. But this is not your ordinary school literary magazine.  Instead, we were inspired to start a state-wide online and published magazine to showcase teen poets, writers, essayists, and artists in our great Mitten State.  We call ourselves MIteen Writers.  And to inspire the many writers in our state, we started an Instagram account to share daily writing prompts.

Our first prompt:

For the first day of the new year, let's start with just one word. Grab your notebook and brainstorm a list of touchstone words. Which will you select to be your #oneword for 2017? Your one word should serve as an inspiration, a reminder, as a call to action for your year. Share your word below, or better yet, snap a pic of your brainstorm and word selection. We can't wait to see what your #wordfor2017 will be!

When our classes resumed last week, I brought this prompt into my high school classroom. Unlike last year, when I had the students brainstorm in their notebooks and then share their one word on a sticky note tacked to the cabinets in my classroom, this year I had my students add their one word to an index card. Why the change? Because last year their touchstone words lived in my room. And they lived in my room for only a portion of 2016.  Come June, our words were stripped from the walls and tossed into the trash in order to ready the room for a new batch of students in the fall.  For a word, a resolution, or a mantra to have power, it must be present. It must be ubiquitous.

So this year, we added our words to index cards. We decorated our cards, shared them in a gallery walk around the room, and then we tucked them away.  Some students stuffed theirs into the folds of their wallet or the front pouch of their backpack.  Others asked for tape to add theirs to the inside door of their locker.  Still others planned to tape theirs to the mirror at home, pin it to the wall near their bed.

Mine - "grow" - stayed tucked in my writer's notebook for a few days.  I had made my list, just like I asked my students to do, and selected my word.  But I knew something wasn't ringing true. It didn't feel like my word quite fit.  It was headed in the right direction, but it wasn't a perfect fit.

It wasn't until this past Sunday afternoon, when the yoga instructor at the Y asked us to set our intention for our afternoon practice that I figured out what it was.  Sitting cross-legged on my mat, she asked us to let our intention rise as one word inside us. Let it resonate.

And that was it.  That's my word.

Resonate.

Grow was on the right track.  I wanted a word for 2017 that moved me into new spaces, into innovation. But my hope for 2017 isn't that I grab for a wild variety of ideas and watch them grow, hope they grow.  Instead, I needed a touchstone word that called for me to be intentional, to have vision, to ensure that my actions resonated with my priorities and that priorities resonated with how I was spending my time and energy.

Resonate.

It is a word that calls me to reflect on how I am helping my students' voices resonate in our world.
It is a word that asks to me pause, to consider what I am asking of others, what I am asking of myself.
It is a word that inspires me act with empathy, with compassion.

"Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering." - Matthieu Ricard

 

Practicing Poetry

Flickr image the from TED Conference

I was fortunate to be able to attend both Eric Johnson's and Sarah Kay's poetry workshops at the TED Summit in Banff a couple of weeks ago. Both workshops invited participants to delved into the performance aspect of poetry, and for those of us in the classroom setting, consider how we might bring these lessons back to our students. I walked away from both sessions not only with a notebook filled of excited, albeit nearly illegible, reminders of the exercises both presenters lead us through, but I also left with a few drafts of new poems.

High school English teacher Andrew Simmons wrote about the importance of bringing poetry into the classroom in an article published not long ago by The Atlantic:

"Reading original poetry aloud in class can foster trust and empathy in the classroom community, while also emphasizing speaking and listening skills that are often neglected in high school literature classes."

I couldn't agree more. Bringing perfomance poetry into the classroom, whether via YouTube channels like Button Poetry or through live performances, can help student voice and choice take center stage in our learning communities. Poetry builds bridges; it helps readers and writers to connect and empathize with the particular experiences that connect all of us. Poetry brings into focus our humanity.  So here are ideas I learned while attending the TED Summit workshops to help bring performance poetry into your classroom.

Erik Johnson's session began with Willie Perdomo's poem titled "Where I Live." Erik asked workshop participants to listen for the sensory details the words and phrases of the poem evoked. Using this poem as a mentor text, we then were asked to imagine our homes and make a list of what a person would see, smell, taste, hear, and feel.  I could easily picture this exercise being used in conjunction with George Ella Lyon's "Where I'm From" poem. In a similar way that I've used Lyon's poem, we created a list of concrete images and details which we then crafted into a poem, sharing our favorite lines aloud. The idea Erik presented was about giveing students mentors for their potential slam pieces and deconstructing those models into smaller chunks in order to give the novice poetry performer a place to begin.

Sarah Kay's poetry masterclass workshop also focused on the inclusion of sensory and figurative details in the craft of poetry performance. She started her workshop by inviting participants into a safe-space, asking that we refrain from engaging with social medial during the session in order to focus our attention on the stories unfolding in the room. Our writing began with a prompt which had us creating a list. Why a list? Well, most people don't spend hours each day crafting poems, especially poems for performance. It can be an overwhelming task to ask of students, or in our case, a crowded room of adults. But a list, a list is something we all know how to do. We don't need instructions on how to create a list.

We listed out three things we knew to be true, an activity she used to craft the piece she perfomed for her 2011 TED Talk titled "If I Should Have a Daughter." As we created our lists, Sarah asked us to be as literal as possible, adding in concrete details to help listeners understand the particulars of our truths. Here are mine:

1. I know that teaching without heart is not teaching at all.
2. I know that homemade pickles taste better than any pickle you will ever find on a store shelf, especially if the cucumbers are homegrown.
3. I know there is forgiveness in gardening.

After sharing our favorite truths, Sarah walked us through why this type of list works so well as a starting point for poetry. Lists, whether they are about three things we know to be true or 10 things I should have learned by now, help us access and illuminate all that stuff that is just floating around in our brains. It is being able to toss a baited hook into our conscience and come back with potential writing ideas. Without that starting point, we're standing on the shore and simply hoping an idea will jump out at us. Writing rarely works like this.  A list gives writers a starting point.

So, you've got a list, but now what? Sarah lead us through a discussion and activity meant to elicit more sensory details in our writing.  It is those details and particulars that help readers connect to our writing.  This time we started with an abstract concept - regret. Sarah explained that regret, as a concept, can mean so many different things to different people.  Instead, she challenged us to think about what regret looks like, sounds like, tastes like.  Participants came up with such powerful metaphors to define regret. Regret looks like a trash can filled with crumpled notebook paper. Regret stutters, trying to grasp for words you should have known in the first place. Regret tastes like bitter chocolate. Challenging us to use more sensory details helped reveal a more particular and descriptive experience of an abstract idea. This same exercise could be used with any of those lofty ideals that emerging writers struggle to make sense of - justice, hate, love, sorrow.

After completing this exercise, Sarah had us dip back into our original list and select one truth to add sensory details to. I returned to my homemade pickles. As we added sensory details to capture what we knew to be true, Sarah paused to challenge us again, this time to try to include figurative language as well. How might our descriptions and metaphors do double duty? As I wrote about planting cucumber plants with my youngest son, I challenged myself to describe small moments in novel ways. Sarah asked us to picture a single moment. For me, it was the dirt collected under my son's small fingernails.  And that one moment is where I think my new poem will start:

The smell of earth collects under small fingernails, changing waning moons to full eclipses.

But Sarah's workshop didn't just include writing poetry. We also spent time talking about the art of perfomance. How do you get students comfortable performing their original work for others. This is not a simple task. In fact, the fifty or so of us gathered in Sarah's workshop all tightened our shoulders a little bit when she introduced that we would be standing to share our work.  However, what made it easier was the fact that we started with an improv game. Performance, Sarah stated, is anxiety-producting, but it should also be fun. These two feelings aren't mutally exclusive.  So we pushed our tables to the side of the room and stood in a large circle. She asked us to pick our favorite word from our writing.  Standing in a circle, we were to make eye contact with someone across the room, and at the same time as all other participants, we said our word to the other person. Then we all shouted our word at the same time. Gradually we added movement to showcase our word and send it across the circle. Because we were all shouting and moving at the same time, people in the group didn't feel nervous. It was a game; it was fun. Finally, we went around the circle and one by one shouted and acted out our word.  The catch was that after each person said their word, all other workshop participants had to do the same movement and say the word with the same intonation. However awkward we might have felt, all the other participants had to act it out as well.  And by starting our performance in this manner, we were able to talk about using our voices and body to impart meaning in a playful way.

I am grateful to both Erik and Sarah for sharing their expertise. I'm looking forward to bringing these ideas back to my high school English classroom in the fall.  I'm curious about how other teachers incorporate performance poetry into their curriculums. Please share your ideas and resouces!

Not Just A Matter of Luck

It is our first full day at the TED Summit in Banff. Our group of 30 TED Innovative Educators (TIEs) from around the world is pitching our innovation plans. Mine has to do with mentoring passion. In preparing my pitch, I am reminded of a conversation a number of years back.

The year I first started teaching high school English, we piled into a friend's Honda and drove south to Williamsburg, Virginia, to spend Thanksgiving break with a group of friends from our college years. We spent all morning, afternoon, and into the wee hours of the morning cooking, eating, laughing, playing Boogle, and chatting. Sometime after three in the morning, one of my close friends turned to me and declared me lucky. "You've always known what you wanted to do with your life." And then she popped a question that many of my high school students have also grappled with:

"How do your figure out your passion?"

I didn't always know that I wanted to be a teacher. As a child, I remember declaring that I wanted to be an astronomer, namely because being an astronaut sounded scary and none of first grade peers seemed to know that an astronomer was. I thought it sounded cool. Secretly, I wanted to be a mermaid. But all the while, whether astronomer, mermaid, author, or teacher, I was writing. When I look back at what brought me joy as a child and what continues to bring me joy, it often involves writing. My passion for encouraging emerging writers to share their voice with real readers developed out of my own love for writing.

Luckily, I had teachers along the way that encouraged my writing. Tucked away somewhere in a trunk in my parent's basement is my very first book - The Amazing Talking Dog -  which I wrote as a fourth grader as part of the Young Author's initiative. In eighth grade, my English teacher, Mrs. Zeinstra, had us bring in notebooks which we wrote in every single day. We scribbled down lines from favorite poems which we found in her collection of anthologies lining the windowsills. We crafted stories that incorporated the hijinks of our peers as main plot points, taking joy in reading them aloud. We wrote every day. As a high school senior, my AP English teacher asked if he might submit a poem I wrote for an assignment to a regional writing competition. Before submitting it, we met after school to talk about the tone of one particular word I had used in the piece. Mr. Dik and I discussed how a single word can alter the feel of a text, but ultimately, he left the decision about whether I changed the work in my hands. Weeks later he took me into the city along with a couple of other classmates when the winners were announced. My name wasn't classed, but it didn't matter. I was lucky. It was this experience - playing with words, crafting lines, working with writers - where I was lucky to discover what I wanted to spend my life doing.

My good friend and so many of my students have not been as lucky, especially when what has brought them joy does not easily fit into one of the content-area silos of our current education system. What happens to the student who wants to design toys? What content-area does that fall under? Will that student be encouraged in our current system? What happens to the passion that does not easily fit into the curriculum of our algebra classes or biology or American literature?

We are educating students out of their stories. We are educating people out of passion.

That Thanksgiving conversation has haunted me, namely because I found my friend's question so difficult to answer:

"How do you figure out your passion?"

She wanted something more tangible, something she could do. Was there a class that I took in college that helped me discover a career path I am passionate about? Was there a book she could read? In my current classroom, I hear echoes of this same question. Is there a website I could look at? A test I might take to understand what my passion might be?

We have taught students how to look up the answers, but we have given them the questions. We have fed them questions that have right answers. My students, many of them, lack the confidence to struggle with the unknown, lack the practice of coming up with their own big questions.

I teach high school English in the third poorest county in my state. Our high school of about 900 students sits squarely in the middle of Michigan farm country. Over the course of this past year, I have had students struggle with food insecurity, homelessness, depression and suicide, broken homes, and broken hearts. Our teachers are fighting to raise our graduation rate and prepare our students for what lies outside the walls of our school. Unfortunately, our effectiveness is measured in how well our students pass the state tests. And so to prepare students for these tests and to take the college entrance exams, many of the writing experiences that my students have had in school have been in the form of timed essays written to a single prompt. As many of my students will be first generation college students, early exposure to the type of writing tasks that they will encounter on the SAT and ACT and AP test is helpful. To an extent. However, this cannot be the only type of writing we ask of students. Such high-stakes testing situations will not make up a majority of the writing experiences that my students will have over the course of their lifetimes. And yet, this is the type of writing they are most often asked to craft whilde in school. By the time I meet students as sophomores, juniors, and seniors, they are frustrated writers, frustrated by a lack of choice, lack of purpose, lack of writing that has relavence to their lived experiences.  They no longer see the purpose of writing yet another essay. Far too many papers have been returned with red circles and hash marks and a letter that looms large at the top of the page. Sure it is for a grade, but what does that mean? What has that taught someone about the purpose of writing?

I want my students to graduate high school as connectors, collaborators, and creators. If we don't facilitate more opportunities for students to do this inside the classroom, how can we expect them to be curious and critical learners outside of the classroom. As teachers, we need to facilitate possibility, potential, and passion. How can we help students not only discover their passion but pursue it as well? It shouldn't simply be a matter of luck.

Keepin' It Real

Snow day #7.

This time, I have the house to myself. My boys had a two-hour delay this morning, so after scuttling them out the door, I parked myself in front of the fireplace to plan. And email. And follow-up. To make arrangements and get permission.

But this is not a bad thing. In fact, it is perfect timing. I laid out a challenge for myself at the beginning of this school year: each writing assignment I asked my students to complete needed to be for an authentic purpose, an authentic audience. This has been a passion of my since I began teaching and working with my regional Writing Project over a decade ago. But up until this year, I had been teaching in the Philadelphia area, rich with connections and resources. This year, I am teaching in a rural district in central Michigan. Would I be able to connect my rural readers and writers with similar authentic experiences? Sounded like a perfect challenge for me!

My students and I have been incredibly fortunate this year to connect with so many different experts in a variety of fields. We've had the local university newspaper editors in to speak with my journalism students, we've Skyped with the Salem Witch Museum while studying Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, and the last two weeks have been all about connections!

My tenth graders began our American Nightmares unit at the start of our new semester near the close of January. We've discussed what identifies a literary work as a piece of Dark Romantic or Gothic literature. We've read Poe's "The Raven" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," discussed T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men," reviewed "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "Young Goodman Brown," next week we'll read Stephen King, and all the while, we've been using these as mentor texts for writing our own Gothic-inspired short stories.  But the students are not simply writing a story for me to read, and they aren't putting together a simple class anthology. No. We are writing for publication.

Inspired by fellow Writing Project teacher Brian Kelly and his amazing group of eighth graders, my students and I are publishing our short stories in a collected book via Amazon's CreateSpace. I knew that when I began my year teaching American Literature that this is where we were headed. And it has taken all of the last 20 weeks to get here.

Each writing lesson has built to the past two weeks.  Early in our year together, students submitted work for publication in other venues. A number of my students were published a few months back after submitting creative work to spaces like Teen Ink and Figment, but now we are not simply submitting our work to an outside editor to approve or reject. I have asked my students to become the writers, the editors, the producers, and production managers as well.

In preparation, we needed to know a lot about writing Gothic and horror-inspired short stories. We needed expert help. So not only did we look to our texts as our mentors, but we opened up our classroom doors and invited the experts in. Last week we were so fortunate to have two fantastic Michigan horror writers, Peggy Christie and MontiLee Stormer, from the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers (GLAHW) join our classes. Yup, multiple classes. These two women hit the road early to travel from the Detroit area to spend the entire day in rural, mid-Michigan and connect with my high school writers.  And we learned so much! They shared their inspiration for crafting stories, advice for building suspense, thoughts on current writers and movies (boo to "gore-porn"), and answered so many of our questions as we were drafting our own stories. Walking out the door at the end of the day, Ms. Stormer shared that the GLAHW also used Amazon's CreateSpace to publish their group's annual editions and offered to help with our process of using the space if we needed it. The whole experience invigorated our classroom of writers. Students have drafted and crafted in earnest. And the snow days helped. Over the course of last week's snow days, I had students return to class this past Monday with 9, 10, and 11 page short stories!

And then came Monday.  In an effort to better understand what makes something frightening, psychologist Dr. Robin Ward joined my tenth grade English classes to talk about the origins of fear, dread, and the uncanny.  Our stories are focused on psychological terror and dread, less on gore. We needed to better understand what triggered that sense of dread. Dr. Ward spoke about our innate flight or fight responses, what triggers those responses, and how the body physically responds to these sensations, all of which helped us add more concrete details to our stories. And no Gothic-inspired story would be complete with out a sense of the uncanny, so Dr. Ward shared a bit of Freud's essay on the uncanny, which he referred to as the unheimlich, or "un-homelike." And the students scribbled down notes in their writer's notebooks while he spoke. Were they listening? Heck yes! How do I know?

Today. I'm parked in front of my fireplace, laptop teetering on my knees as I enjoy my second snow day this week. My inbox is filling up by the minute with "So and So's Google Doc (Invitation to edit)." Story after story drops into my Google Drive folder. Students are spending their snow day writing, just like I am. What more could an English teacher ask for? Students have a "day off" and they are spending it as a "day on." They are writing and revising, using their mentor texts and advice from experts to craft clear narratives that employ the rhetorical strategies of Gothic literature. It has been an incredibly productive day off, if you ask me.

And me, well not only have I had time to write as well, but I already have my next connection planned. On Friday, my public speaking students and I will head over to our local assisted living center to interview elderly residents about their childhood for StoryCorps.  But that's for another blog post. Until then, we're keepin' it real.

Interested in my American Nightmares unit resources?  Find my unit materials HERE.

Slice of Life Blogging Challenge

March begins with a stutter start.

For the second week in a row, I will likely be out of school for multiple days. Last week, under a wet blanket of 10 inches of snow, we were out of school on Thursday and Friday.  I'm off today as a result of the piling snow, currently at about six inches with more still coming down.  I expect we will be out again tomorrow.

Usually, I am pressed for time to write.  Starting a new position this year - new state, new home, new school, new curriculum, and lots of new students - I have struggled to make time to blog.  So this stutter start to March - our multiple snow days - brings with it a welcome return to reflection through the annual Slice of Life blogging challenge issued by Two Writing Teachers.

The goal: blog. every. single. day. At least for the month of March.  I tried to do this in earnest last year, and I nearly made it. Okay, so I only had 14 entries in March of 2015.  But in 2014, I got a bit closer with 22 entries for the month and even had one of the entries published in the book Elevate Empathy. This year, I'm aiming for a perfect 31.

But what is this whole "slice of life" thing?  The blog challenge started with an inspired English teacher. Stacey Shubitz shared her experience about discovering "slice of life" writing while reading her students' writer's notebook entries:

"In February 2008, Stacey was reading one of her student’s writer’s notebooks and came across a piece of writing about his sister’s lost necklace. Christian wrote an entire entry about the outrage he felt when his mother made the family drop everything to search for his sister’s lost necklace in their apartment. Thirty minutes after they lifted up couch cushions and checked under all of the beds, her necklace turned up on her neck! There was something about his entry, this little snippet of Christian’s life. It seemed like a slice of life story. Stacey googled “slice of life” and found that it’s a term frequently used in literature and entertainment. It essentially means to describe everyday experiences with as much realism as possible. Stacey realized that was exactly the kind of entry Christian had written."

So the annual Slice of Life blogging challenge asks writers to share snippets of their every day, their ordinary, to write with details about a particular moment.

And so I am thankful for this stutter start to March. It is a much needed pause. Time to reflect.  Time to soak in and respond to the ordinary, the every day, and to capture a moment. Too often I am concerned about what is happening next, what is over the horizon. Today, I get to sit at my dining room table, watch the snow fall and birds flock to my feeder, and reinvest in my writing.

At least until the kids, who also have a snow day, burst through the back door in dripping wet snow pants and bright red cheeks come in search of cups of marshmallow-filled warmth. "I don't wanna get frost-nipped, Mom, so I neeeeed hot cocoa," my little one looks up at me with laughing eyes.

This blog is my hot-cocoa, my warmth. When I have felt out in the cold for too long, this is where I need to warm up, to write my way into understanding. So thank you, March, for this snow day stutter start.

Throwing out the Rules

Illustration by Austin Kleon

Elizabeth just came up to my desk to ask if she is allowed to use contractions in her personal essay.

Allowed.

Our student writers are taught a set of rules. Don't use contractions. Double space your essays. Spell out numbers under ten. Write everything in complete sentences. Make sure that your subject and your verbs agree in number. These are easy to teach, easy to learn. But clearly the writing that we remember, that packs an emotional punch, is more than a well-employed set of grammatical rules.

As an English teacher, I admit to focusing a bit too much of my energy on marking misplaced commas and dangling modifiers in the past, but this is not where the heart of writing lies.  In spending our energies on correcting grammar, we teach our students that grammar is important. Exclusively. When we focus on writing as teaching students to write a certain number of paragraphs, to a particular set of rules, we limit student possibilities for expression.

I understand the need to begin somewhere.  However, a set of rules, a list of dos and don'ts, decapitates student writing. (I asked my creative writing students for help with this sentence. Jordan came up with the verb decapitates.) Instead, taking a lead from Kylene Beers, Lynne Dorfman, and Kelly Gallagher, I ask my students to find mentor texts for each piece of writing they craft. What is the writing doing? What do you notice? What moves is the writer making? Beginning in this manner, students come up with their own rules. They notice that personal essays published in the New York Times Magazine use contractions. The college application essays that earned the highest marks are those that use slang, that contain intentional fragments, that break the rules of what is "allowed."

I am asking my students to think about writing for publication. They are trained to write in five paragraphs, but pick up any magazine, a newspaper, read a blog. How many of them are written in formulaic five-paragraphs? Yes, we must begin somewhere when it comes to teaching writing. However, I firmly believe teaching students to write to a set of rules, rules that so many of us break, is not the place to begin. Rather than close off possibilities, we must find ways to open them up.

So it's not that I'm throwing the "rules" out the window. I'm just setting them aside for awhile and letting our community of writers figure out the rules for ourselves.

Labor of Love

I don't have a desk. Okay, I do, but it is home to my sewing machine and not really a conducive place for writing, crowded as it is with snips of thread, straight pins, and pinking shears. Instead, I write each day at our dining room table, either well before the sun comes up or well after it goes to sleep. These are my hours. The quiet time when my little boys are snuggled into their beds, and there is time to reflect and not just react. 

I especially appreciate this daily blogging challenge during the month of March hosted by Two Writing Teachers. Instead of keeping my writing to myself in my Writer's Notebook, I have this opportunity to write daily, to share daily, and to connect daily. I encourage my students to connect and share in similar ways, but then often find that without this daily deadline, my own blogging gets pushed to the bottom of a to-do list whose items I know I will never be able to completely check off. My blog is pushed to the back of the line behind responding to parent emails and providing feedback on student essays and arranging for Skype sessions with authors and calling local museums to arrange for speakers and responding to more emails. I write daily, but the writing that renews my soul - reflective writing and creative writing - often times is left as an unwritten monologue playing through my head while I attend to more immediate concerns.

This morning a request appeared in my inbox to share my reflections on when, where, and why I write as part of the weekly National Writing Project iAnthology series. And so I've spent some time today mulling over why I let the writing that I am truly passionate about go unwritten much of the time. I don't have a good answer to this question. But I do have a simple answer.

It's hard.

This is the writing I care about. I care about weaving a narrative, pulling threads of ideas together, making a creative and hard-hitting point. But this takes time. I am not someone that can pound out a blog post in minutes. I read over and write over each sentence. I write in stops and starts, slowly moving forward like a child on a rocking horse, ever leaning forward to an imagined finished line. And so far, I've only written five paragraphs, that is if you can really count my fourth as a paragraph. But I've considered why I've let that sentence hang there alone.

It's hard.

And now I'm at seven paragraphs. But if it takes me this long to write this short piece, I have to remember what it might take a student as of yet less experienced than I am at blogging to share his work publicly. Check the widgets to the right. I've been at this since 2007. And I know that this is hard. I must remember that this is hard no matter what age or level of experience you bring to writing. To do it well, writing is a labor of love, but it is labor. It is work. Writers must be given the space, the time, the opportunity to work at the craft. In order to create a narrative worth reading, students need time....writers need time to put in the work.

And, sometimes a deadline helps, too.  

Fostering Creativity

You couldn't miss the nervous energy in the room this morning.

We've just finished reading Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir Night, and while reading, I asked students to keep track of significant quotations from the book, quotations that impacted them as a reader, quotations that stung and haunted. For about a week now, we've been sharing our quotes, both digitally as well on posters that hang about my classroom. And it all lead up to today.

Late last week, I introduced to my students the purpose behind keeping track of all those quotations. Not only would we be referencing them in our class discussions, but I asked each student to pick one. Pick a quote that speaks to our human condition and do something creative with it. That's it. That was the assignment. Do something creative. 

Okay, so I asked them to do a couple more things with the quotation, like have it cited correctly on their work and connect to a well-worded theme statement that they could discuss and connect to our current lives, but I didn't give a set of step-by-step instructions. Instead, I hung a few exemplary projects from previous students around the room and gave them space and time to think. Be creative.

We often ask our students to be creative, to think critically, to be original, but then we don't give them space to do this in the classroom. If students do not see what creativity looks like, what it sounds like, and how it happens, it is incredibly difficult to nurture. 

Yesterday a student came into class with her canvas covered in black and white photos of shoes, melted crayon wax dripping over her images. She used class time to paint Mod Podge onto her canvas. And the student sitting next to her, a young man working on a collage, had no idea what to think. He had never heard of Mod Podge or decoupage. I overheard a whole conversation between these two students about how you can use the gel medium to seal and transfer images, to collage and create in ways that he never thought of. And while it started as a conversation that may have been better suited to an art classroom, it pretty quickly changed into a conversation about why each student had selected their particular quote, why they were making particular design choices, format and genre choices for their creative piece, and connections they were making to things learned in their World Cultures course. I eavesdropped on a conversation that involved the words "analysis" and "rhetoric." And that conversation may not have happened in quite the same way if something tangible, something creative hadn't connected them.

And so today, when I asked students to share their creativity with the class, there was a palpable anxiousness in the room. Sure, a few were anxious about speaking in front of their peers, but even more so, there seemed to be an excitement to share their creations and revelations. I asked for volunteers to present and hands shot up. We discussed the visual choices and connections of our mixed media artists, heard original poetry, watched a video recording of an original modern dance performed by two of my students, talked typography choices as part of visual rhetoric. Students analyzed how messages and how themes connected with readers.  At more than one point during our class, I had students explain why and how they decided to alter their original plans in order to better reflect the theme presented by the quotation. After the bell to end class rang, a student came up to tell me that she had rediscovered water colors for this project, that in painting her piece she connected to the quotation through the process of painting.

And while some might look at this project as being "fluff," I know that by having my students produce something creative connecting quotations and themes that my students will be better equipped to write their original essays on themes found in their reading next week. I may not have had my students complete a graphic organizer or a sentence outline, but my classroom is now a gallery of quotations. They have evidence. Students will have heard 25 original theme statements before ever putting pen to paper when they write their essay on a theme found in their reading. They have support. They will have been thoroughly immersed in conversations about rhetoric, analyzing the impact of choices, both artistic and written before they ever begin to draft their essays. And opening up time and space in the classroom for students be creative also opened up opportunities for my students to analyze a text in new and creative ways. I won't have 25 of the exact same essays to read next week because I gave students space to engage with one another in order to produce something creative.  They are now better prepared to write creatively and critically about the text. In asking them to produce something original, they are now better equipped to write something original. 

Remixing Writing

It is one of my students' favorite daily writing prompts. Mine, too. Yesterday I came into class with a stack of newspapers in hand. Before the bell rang, I walked around the room handing out a section of the paper to each student. I got some quizzical looks. We usually begin each class writing in our writer's notebooks. Are we going to start today with reading? Nope. We're started the day by remixing the newspaper.

I shared Austin Kleon's blackout poetry with students, and you could hear a buzz move throughout the room. They didn't want to wait for me to finish explaining our writing task. They wanted to jump right in. And they did!

After they spent some time carefully considering their word choices and marking out meaning, we spent some time sharing our process. How did students begin the task of making something new from another person's words? Some began with a single word, plucking the most important word from an article, letting it form the heart of the blackout poem, and then finding the words to connect with that idea throughout the rest of the article.  Others started with a pencil, circling whatever words first intrigued them and let the meaning of the piece arise naturally from the work. Still others began with an idea in mind, and like a hunter, stalked the article for the necessary words.  And it was in this discussion on how we went about the task of making meaning that we were able to reflect on the value of having different perspectives, different approaches to creating meaning.

There is so much value in creating blackout poetry with students. Not only do students have the opportunity to step outside their own writing by working with someone else's words, but also blackout poetry begs the creator to take a different perspective on writing in carefully considering both the original writer's words as well as the process by which writers create. And it's a heck of a lot of fun, too!

Overwhelmed...but in a good way

I have too many blog posts in me! So right off the bat, know that this post is almost more of a reminder to me of all the things that I want to write more in depth about in the coming weeks. It has been an overwhelming semester, filled with a classroom makeover, presentations, author visits, and so much more.   I look forward to sharing these developments with you in the new year.

First, I need to share a bit more about my classroom redesign.  I shared some of the early steps in my classroom makeover in September, but I need to post my more recent learning space redesigns. My initial steps to create a more student-focused, student-driven classroom have lead to even more changes. As I spent time reflecting on my educational philosophy, I realized I needed to make a few more changes to my classroom space so that my philosophy was mirrored in my physical  classroom space. My classroom is open, with flexible seating in the form of stools, pillows, ottomans (which double as book storage), and a couch.  And I'm also happy to share that our classroom is featured as part of the #ClassroomCribs challenge. If you are looking for inspiration for your own classroom makeover, be sure to check out the work of Erin Klein, Ben Gilpin, and A.J. Juliani over at ClassroomCribs.com.

UPDATE: Shortly after posting this I learned that I am one of the Grand Finalists in the ClassroomCribs Challenge!

Click to enlarge our four essential questions.

In addition to redesigning my physical classroom, my curriculum got a big makeover this semester too. For the last decade, our tenth grade English class has focused on world literatures, connecting with the writers of the non-western world.  However this semester, our department took a more thematic approach to our tenth grade curriculum, focusing on four essential questions to guide our new thematic focus on "Perspectives of the Individual." And although initially a bit apprehensive about this change, it has afforded me an opportunity to reimagine my curriculum. I revisited the work of my language arts gurus to help me rethink what was possible. Kelly Gallagher helped me think through how I provide writing feedback (students should write four times more than you can grade) and how I teach close reading (Articles of the Week). Chris Lehman helped me think through possibilities for teaching analytic reading. And so many more mentors than I could name helped inspire my renewed focus on cultivating a student-driven classroom with students doing, speaking, and sharing more than I do. And in addition to adding new core texts, I figured now was the time to make some other big changes, the most significant of which is the move to a 100% paperless classroom. Now, four months into it, I can't imagine teaching any other way.  Going paperless has meant finding better, more collaborative ways of working with students and with working with readers and writers outside of the classroom.

Although I have been pushing my emerging writers to connect with audiences outside the classroom for a number of years now, this semester I have witnessed the pinnacle success of that focus.  My students and I used social media to connect with and invite in a number of writers from a variety of genres into our classroom.  In the last four months we have:

• heard a Holocaust survivor speak of his experiences in three death camps,
• used Skype to speak with the senior editor of Philadelphia Stories and Philadelphia Stories, Jr., Ms. Christine Weiser, about what editors look for in creative writing pieces seeking publication,
• virtually connected with Ms. Leah Nicholson of the Jenkins Publishing Group to learn about ghost writing,
• Skyped with founder and senior editor of Teen Ink, Ms. Stephanie Meyer, to get some advice for submitting our work for publication,
• invited three talented YA authors - E.C. Myers, Marie Lamba, and Ellen Jensen Abbott - to come to our school to speak with us about their inspiration and advice for writing stories,
• learned with a local psychologist about psychoanalytic theory, the 
  
  divided self, and repression which we applied to our reading of The Kite Runner,
• chatted with musician, actor, and novelist Dave Patten about what it takes to "make it" in a creative field, and
• used Twitter and blogs to connect with students and experts all of the world as we researched our #HavPassion projects.     

And the next four months look equally as packed with connections! We will be hosting:

• poet Cameron Conaway, author of Malaria Poems, who will be speaking with my creative writing students about his inspiration and writing craft,
• Elise Juska, author of The Blessings,
• Christopher McDougall, best-selling author of Born to Run,
• Zachariah OHora, children's book author and illustrator,
• Judy Schachner, children's book author and illustrator of Skippyjon Jones,
• Donna Aviles, presenter and author on the United States Orphan Train Movement, and
• Christina Baker Kline, One Book One Philadelphia author of Orphan Train.

So many of these connections have come as a result of my students and I reaching out on social media and asking.  This has been a big take-away that I need to explore more in the coming months.  In talking with Teen Ink's founder Stephanie Meyers when we first connected my students with her via Skype, she graciously showed us virtually around her office and said, "No one has ever asked me to do this, and I love it!"  In putting myself out there and asking anyone and everyone to come into my classroom - fellow teachers, writers, parents, other students - whether it is done in person or virtually, I have opened up opportunities for my students to connect with real audiences. Very little of their written work is seen by only me. We blog using Blogger and respond to classrooms around the country. Students post their work in online portfolios which can easily be shared with fellow teachers, students, and even parents.  And in talking with my students about these opportunities, I have also encouraged them to ask.  They are reaching out through their blogs and through Twitter in order to build their own personal learning network (PLN). I hope to share more of this particular adventure both here and in some upcoming presentations.

Yup, that's me presenting.

Speaking of which, wow! I need to share more of the presentations I've been doing! In the last few months I have had the opportunity to present at the Pennsylvania Council for Teachers of English Language Arts (PCTELA) as well as at the Michigan Google Summit. I was honored as an Emerging Leader at the recent PASCD conference. In a few short weeks, I'll be presenting at the upcoming EduCon conference in Philly with Christina Brennan on "Mentoring Passion" about how we connected my high school students with her elementary students through passion-based learning. And I need to share more about what I have learned from these fantastic organizations and connections.

So, I'm overwhelmed...but in a good way.

Fortunate Failure

I'm taking up Jeremy Hyler's weekly NWP iAnthology prompt today:  "Share a lesson that failed, a student, a piece of writing, etc. Let's embrace failure this week." 

Flickr Creative Commons image by John Liu

With over a decade of teaching experience, I have a number of stories I could share. As I've heard other veteran teachers say, there are days when I wish that I could go back to those students I had my first few years of teaching and apologize. And, I have. I now call a couple of my former students colleagues. But so many of those students and those failures have shaped who I am in the classroom today. I wouldn't be where I am today without them.

In thinking about how a moment of failure shaped how I teach today, I remember Drew.  I had Drew in my honors tenth grade English class about seven years ago.  I was in my fifth year of teaching and had recently switched from teaching ninth grade English to tenth grade English. We were reading Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir Night when I asked students about how the memoir was applicable to modern times. Drew sighed and declared:

"What does it matter? Teenagers don't have power, anyway. We can't change anything."

In one of my very first blog posts, I reflected:

"I stood there gaping for a few moments, the class watching intently to see how I would respond. How could someone so young, just at the start of his journey, be so disenfranchised? How does someone at 16 years old lose all hope? What is it that this student and others in the class who agreed with him be so afraid of, be so demoralized by? Now I know in part that such a comment was meant to goad me; I’m obviously a teacher who believes that the individual can make a difference, can change the world; otherwise, I wouldn’t be a teacher. ...It is a sad day when our future leaders lose their idealism, a belief that they can make a difference, can change the world. What hope does that leave for any of us?"

I had failed Drew and his classmates. I was teaching a book to them. Students were not engaged in the content and ideas of our class because it was something I was doing to them. Learning was not in the hands of my students. It was not meaningful because I was not facilitating learning; I was dictating it. And along with many other failures that year, Drew's question helped to propel my teaching in new directions.

Just this past weekend, one of my friends and fellow Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project teachers Judy Jester shared a quote from her recent trip to Washington D.C. for the National Writing Project annual conference.  In reviewing the 40-year history of NWP, one of the sessions speakers made the distinction between directions and direction, which applies to my role as a writing teacher today: it is not our job to provide directions; instead, it is our role to provide direction.  Kylene Beers, former president of the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE), writes on a similar idea in her book Why Kids Can't Read, asking her readers to reflect on how much time we spend giving instructions rather than on effective instruction.  I first stumbled upon Beers' ideas not long after Drew posed his response to me. That initial failure lead to some critical reflection and revision on how I think about teaching and how I facilitate learning.

I needed that failure to reorient my thinking. In many ways, it was a rather fortunate failure.