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.

Moments Like This

Moments Like This

Electric
Energy runs shoulder to fingertip
When I wrap my arms around her
Proud.

I gather
This moment in my memory,
Room packed with writers
Hopeful.

Wrap
My heart around her excitement,
The nervous joy of her
Pride.

Risking
Her voice to share
A moment of
Poetry.

I could not stop smiling last night.  Two of my tenth grade students not only have the honor of being published in the current issue of Philadelphia Stories Jr., but they both ventured into Philadelphia last night to read their poems to a packed room of student writers, teachers, family, and friends at Mighty Writers. And as I stood at the back of the room watching them read their poems with poise and confidence, I could not help beam with pride. These are the moments that push me to keep doing what I do, encouraging students to write creatively and to share their work with audiences outside of the classroom.

The Power of Publication

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 24

Before sending their pieces out for publication, my tenth grade English classes used Skype to connect with experts in the publishing world. This past November, as my students were in the midst of revising a creative writing piece that stemmed from an idea found in their daily writer's notebook, my students and I had the opportunity to speak with the founder and senior editor of Teen Ink, Ms. Stephanie Meyer. Additionally, students spoke Christine Weiser, the Executive Director of Philadelphia Stories who shared fantastic advice for revising both short stories and poetry, as well as details about what her editorial board looks for in the pieces that are submitted. Students used that advice to revise their work before sending it outside the classroom for publication.

Not only were a number of my students published on Teen Ink's online site, but yesterday evening one of my first semester tenth grade students emailed me that she had received word that she is about to have her poem published in the upcoming print edition of Philadelphia Stories, Jr.  The student's poem stemmed from a writer's notebook prompt where were searched through print editions of the local newspaper for inspiration.  Her poem, "Pray for the People in Camden," will appear in the spring/summer edition of the magazine. As students learned when speaking with Ms. Weiser of Philadelphia Stories, hundreds of students submit their work for publication, but only a few are chosen for the print edition of the publication. Those that are considered for publication have been read multiple times by multiple editors who must agree that a work is worthy of publication. My student's piece was selected from among many poetry submissions by students in our area.

And the student who wrote the piece? Quiet and unassuming.  She rarely spoke in our class and shied away from attention being drawn to her accomplishments.  It was through our daily writer's notebook that I learned of her interest in poetry as a form of storytelling.  It was in asking her and her classmates to work on a piece to send outside the classroom for publication that I learned of her dedication to the craft of writing, watching her in class and online spend hours crafting the lines of her poem, considering if she should add punctuation at her line breaks or not.

Both the prompt she took inspiration from and the use of writer's notebooks in general came from my involvement in the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project and the connections to the teachers and writers of the National Writing Project.  And this is why I am an NWP groupie: in giving my students an opportunity to write every day, the choice of what and how to write, and opportunities to share and publish their work, I have learned more about the young people in my classes, and not just about who they are as writers, but who they are as individuals.  And that has made all the difference in how I am able to support their individual learning adventures.

Holocaust survivor bears witness to atrocities - News Of Delaware County - Delco News Network

Holocaust survivor bears witness to atrocities - News Of Delaware County - Delco News Network

By Lois Puglionesi
CORRESPONDENT

HAVERFORD TWP - Haverford High School English instructor Jen Ward has taught thousands of students about the Holocaust through books like Elie Wiesel’s “Night.” But Ward has always felt her classes have difficulty “making the connection between history and a real person.”

So this year Ward tried something different. With help from the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center she arranged for a Holocaust survivor, Michael Herskovitz, to visit the school last week.

A warm and affable man with a heavy European accent, Herskovitz, 81, described growing up in a small Czechoslovakian village where his religious Jewish parents owned a grocery store. Herskovitz said he never felt different because people treated each other with mutual respect.

But in 1943, when Herskovitz was 13, Nazi soldiers arrived and the happy life he’d known forever changed.Herskovitz described how within weeks synagogues closed, his parents lost their store, Jews were put under curfew and forced to wear yellow Jewish stars.

Stating that it was for their own “protection,” Nazi soldiers transported Herskovitz, his parents and siblings to a ghetto where they were given a tent to live in and fed once or twice a day.The situation grew even more ominous when soldiers took the family to a railroad station and put them on cattle cars crammed with 60-70 people. The train picked up many more passengers before reaching its final destination, Auschwitz.

Read more at the News of Delaware County

On Being Published

When I arrived home this afternoon, I found it perched in my mailbox. Clutching it to my chest while I fumbled to make my key fit in the lock, I rushed inside and immediately flipped to the last few pages of this month’s edition of the English Journal. And there it is in tight black type at the bottom of page 120 – my name.

A poem I submitted months earlier has found its way into NCTE’s publication for secondary English/Language Arts teachers, the English Journal, with its circulation of 25,000. I’ve taught writing for a number of years, and over that time have prodded and cajoled a number of my students into submitting their work for publication outside the walls of our classroom, having never done so myself. However, after a wonderful conversation about publishing opportunities last spring with my after-school creative writing club, the Writers Guild, I finally submitted a few of my pieces to the English Journal. And low and behold, “When We Dance” was selected for publication.

When We Dance

Each morning I stop to kiss
your warm forehead
nestled deep in the down.
Your hot cheek pressed against
my freshly washed one.

Each night we bob and weave
our arms and hands
across the sink reaching for
the toothbrush or toothpaste,
a comb, some floss, or ChapStick.
an intricate ballet.

I stop to try and remember
the first time we danced.

The excitement of seeing my name in print has been a motivating experience that I hope to be able to pass along to my students. In my own writing life, the opportunity to be published has changed the way that I think of myself, the way I identify myself. I am not only a writing teacher. I am a writer. Imagine if all our emerging writers had this experience. There is power in putting your words into the world. And when we get a response to those words, it is a validation of the effort, the creativity, and heart that goes into writing. It is motivation to put your writing out into the world again and again. Every student should have this experience, should be motivated to write and to create for an audience outside of the classroom.