Just Like Students

The first morning back following summer break, the floors still slippery with wax, the smell of cleaning agent clinging to everything, is the morning that we jokingly dread. As soon as it turns August first, we commiserate with our teacher friends that it’s almost time to go back, that we’re not ready, and the summer went too fast. But we’ve all been anticipating this day, the day when the teachers first come back. We’re like our students on this day. We file into the auditorium slowly, more interested in catching up with the colleagues and friends that we haven’t seen during the summer months than with the comments of the morning’s speaker. High school teachers in particular are just like those students that linger, the last to go into the assembly, jockeying for a seat near the rear of the room so they can whisper to friends.

This morning was no different. I stood outside the doors to the high school auditorium with teachers from all the district’s schools gathered to hear the superintendent kick off our year and introduce the morning’s guest speaker, Tony Rotondo, author of Scratch Where it Itches: Confessions of a Public School Teacher. I must admit, I was a little skeptical. Oh no, another speaker. I hope he doesn’t have a PowerPoint presentation about the district’s goals and expectations, our annual yearly progress, and aligning the curriculum with state standards. He didn’t. Instead, Tony infused his message with humor all teachers could relate to – the absurdity of educational acronoyms, shushing strangers in movie theaters, and the everyday irony spilled from the mouths of students. Ultimately, his message of reaching out to the staff and students in our lives was a wonderful start to the new school year. So, you can imagine how surprised I was when he started to read from my entry titled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” to the entire teaching staff in my district.

At the point in his speech where Tony was talking about Alfie Kohn’s work, I was nodding along. I have read a great deal on Kohn’s work – from the power and pitfalls of the letter grade to the myth of homework. So imagine my surprise when shortly after talking about Kohn, the morning’s speaker segues into discussing creativity and standards in the classroom and from his mouth booms my name through the microphone. Suddenly, I was a student again. Hey, that’s me he’s taking about! I was being singled out for something I wrote. My words have power. That feeling soon turned to panic as I realized – hey, that’s me he’s talking about. I felt my spine curve as I attempted to sink into the green fabric of the auditorium seat when he started to read part of my blog for the staff of the entire district. Called to the front of the auditorium, I don’t think my eyes left the carpet. Don’t trip. I was a student again. The speaker presented me with a gift (thanks for the portfolio, Mr. Rotondo!) and whispered, “Good luck with Etcetera.” And just like my students, I didn’t really hear what he had to say immediately following the recognition. I was that awkward student all over again, giddy from the recognition and anxious all at once.

The moment reinforced something for me. I need to make sure that my students have this experience, that their words, written or spoken, are recognized and honored for their power. I write today in part because a high school teacher took notice of something I had written and entered me in a local poetry competition (thanks Mr. Dik!). Would I have continued writing essays, poetry, taking creative writing classes had that teacher not recognized my interest in writing? Probably. But without that one teacher’s recognition, I might not have found my confidence or courage to take risks in my writing until much later. Moments like these have meaning and power for students - for everyone. When we are recognized for what we think, what we say, what we write or create, our world changes. We realize a new world of possibilities and understand that what we have created has power. Every student should have that moment. Every student should feel that world of possibility.

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson argues that we are currently a part of an educational system that perpetuates the stigmatization of mistakes. With the prominence that high stakes tests have in our classrooms, students are less willing to take risks, to go out on a limb and make a mistake. But as Robinson states, “If you are not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

It’s only twenty minutes long. Give it a watch: Sir Ken Robinson talks on “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”

Are we are educating people out of their creativity?

I have a contradictory classroom. The first thing I hand students when they walk into my class is a syllabus that touts the need for creative and critical thinking. We talk about the need to think “outside the box,” to question what they see, what they hear, what they read; students must question how they are educated. One of the lessons I return to throughout the year is the ability to recognize shades of grey, to get out of the dichotomous black vs. white line of thinking. Especially when studying the cultures and literatures of the world, there are no easy answers when it comes to cultural beliefs, values, and ethics.

And then I have to teach them how to take a bubble test, to eliminate the wrong answer and find the right one. It is an important skill for passing the standardized state proficiency tests and achieving a high score on the SATs, which will in turn get them into a better university and potential scholarships. The way our current system is set up, students who know how take objective tests are the ones who succeed.

It is a strange contradiction. Each year I attend multiple meetings, trainings, and conferences on rethinking education to include the whole child. Current educational philosophy is predicated on Gardner’s research on multiple intelligences, that people have a variety of ways of expressing their intelligence whether it is artistically, kinesthetically, musically, logically, etc. Each year we learn about ways to incorporate and highlight these different styles of intelligence in the classroom. Teachers are using differentiated instruction techniques to help children of varying talents and intelligences demonstrate their skills. Educational specialists throw around words like formative assessment, authentic assessment, alternative assessment – all of which are at odds with the objective forms of assessment (state tests and college entrance exams) that students (and teachers) are judged on. As teachers, our educational philosophies are at odds with our nation’s educational mandates.

And our students are caught in between.

As Robinson states, “We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children.” At the very least, our schools are inconsistent – current educational philosophy and practice is at odds with the directives of the No Child Left Behind bill. Is Robinson right, do our schools kill creativity?

Thanks to Eric at Sicheii Yazhi for pointing me to the piece by Sir Ken Robinson.

The Art of Revision

Revision is perhaps the most difficult part of writing. Not long ago, I head author James McBride talk about crafting his memoir The Color of Water, and he said it rather eloquently: "Writing is rewriting." It is not necessarily getting the ideas first onto the blank white page, although there are days that I struggle with that as well, but the letting go of words, phrases, and images. Revising is a process of not simply refining one's ideas, but also letting some ideas go.

The process of writing is different for everyone. With the blank page staring me down, daring me to write, I usually find it very easy to get my initial ideas onto the page. It is a sort of purging. But once that momentum slows to a molasses drip, I deliberate over every word, the placement of every piece of punctuation. I start the process of revision midway through my writing as a way to figure out what it is that I am trying to say. My poetry course a few weeks ago highlighted how painful the revision process can be.

Each day we were given a prompt and about an hour and a half to craft a poem. There were mornings when the ideas came spilling out. On the first day when we were told to write a piece about family, my pen was to the paper before the teacher had finished explaining the prompt. As I scribbled my ideas on the blank page, I would periodically stop to scratch out unnecessary prepositions and articles, draw arrows to move lines to different stanzas. Each time I got to what I thought was the end of the poem, I would start over by recopying the poem onto a clean page, beginning the process all over again, scratching out and moving some more. I went through about eight revisions before I got the poem to a working first draft. Each line scratched out of the poem about a family member, my grandma, was hard to let go. Especially in poetry, where each word counts, revision can be a painful process of letting go.

As my professor conferenced with me over my poetry, suggesting revision ideas and lines to get rid of, I was able to empathize with my students. For emerging writers, especially when they are writing about something personally significant, it can be difficult to revise and scratch out clunky sentences and phrases if those words have emotional weight for the student. Students are much more comfortable, as all writers are, with editing their work. Editing the misplaced commas and misspelled words is easy. If we think of writing like building a house, when we edit the mechanical and grammatical problems of a piece, we change the curtains to make sure they match the décor. When we revise, we change the foundation, a much more labor intensive project. Editing is not the real work of writing. As James McBride said, “Writing is rewriting.” So I must find better ways to engage my students in the work of writing.

Rethinking Poetry

I love when lines of poetry subtly slide into a conversation. Poetry takes hold of us, lurks somewhere in the recesses of memory until the moment we need it again, whether for reference, humor, or comfort. Good verse follows us all the days of our lives. So why is it that when students enter my classroom each fall, they nearly froth when I introduce the first poem, ready to rip it to shreds. They strangle the vocabulary words with red circles, never really planning to look up the definitions. They slash through the metaphors and similes, and cage the first letters of words to jail the alliterations, and they do not feel the poem wailing against such injury. The poet Billy Collins expresses this same sentiment at the close of his poem “Introduction to Poetry.”

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

This is what English teachers do to poetry, myself included. We are wonderful teachers of device; we help our students understand the difference between metaphor and metonymy, introduce allusions and analogies, and dissect significant stanza breaks. But do we put the pieces back together? I’m guilty of letting students walk out with the bell, leaving a poem bound and gagged, slumped lifeless in the shadows of room 203.

I am not arguing that the craft of poetry should not be taught. In fact reading some of Nancie Atwell’s pieces has me thinking about how I could utilize poetry more often and effectively in my classroom. Except this time, instead of solely focusing on the style and structure of a poem, I want to find more opportunities for students to react to poetry on the visceral level. As Atwell describes in the introduction to “A Poem A Day: A Guide to Naming the World,” poetry as a genre gives students a “vocabulary for naming emotions and relations” (8). It is from these shared emotional responses and connections to poetry that students begin to also understand and appreciate the craft of the genre. Their connections to verse help them “figure out what matters, explore it, try to make sense of it, endeavor to change it, and help themselves begin to live lives of worth” (2). It is imperative that I present poetry in such a way. It was the poet Wallace Stevens who stated that the very purpose of poetry was “to help people live their lives.” What could be more essential to my teaching? If nothing else, I want students to find one poem or just one line that they can carry around in the pocket of their memory for a lifetime.

Sometimes a pebble is just a pebble

”Don’t write about the pebbles. Write about a pebble.” Nancie Atwell, Lessons That Change Writers

Out of breath, I stumbled into room 326 this morning just as the professor was giving his morning greeting. Today began my journey in the course Teacher as Poet through the Pennsylvania Literature and Writing Project, a week long intensive study of the craft of writing and teaching poetry. An eight and half hour a day, week long course that I’ve been looking forward to all summer. It’s part of the reason I teach. I love being in the classroom, always have. As a 10, 15, 20-year-old student, I eagerly anticipated new classes, new books, new assignments, the energy and the creativity that is sparked by a good teacher, great literature, and a willing class.

With the formalities out of the way, we began this morning’s class with the above quote by Nancie Atwell, a quote that got me reflecting not only on how I teach writing, but about my own writing process as well. Like many emerging writers, I had a problem with generalities. I’d lift those large abstract clichés to unfound, existential, angst-driven glory. But thanks to some wonderful writing teachers, I’ve started to shift my attention to the particulars. In fact, now I find myself in quite the opposite predicament. I load my lonely pebble down with so many hefty adjectives, shackle it with so many prepositional phrases that it sinks to the bottom of my writing. That one lonely pebble, yoked with so many alliterative allusions, creative colors, protracted phrases, weighing it down. But I keep digging at the bottom, sifting through the silt, trying hard to unlodge the same old pebbles. Maybe it didn’t quite fit into one poem, so I’ll lug it into another, only to drown another poem.

I need to let the pebble be just a pebble.

So, below is the first draft of a poem that stemmed from this reflection, the need to let words, ideas breath on their own:

The Phone Call

Fumbling, faltering,
her mouth miles from the receiver,
it takes an anxious minute
for my name, the connection,
to get through the line.
Granddaughter,
soft sigh
of relieved recognition.

We do not talk often,
preferring to send letters
scrawled across the open spaces
fronts and backs of Hallmark greetings
extending to one sheet of pale pink,
then two.

I call
to say thank-you
for the birthday wish,
rhyme signed with Love,
Aunt Lorraine and Uncle Harry.
I cannot ask,
do not touch
the question of her memory,
the one left holding the line.

I'd love feedback if you have any thoughts. Feel free to post a comment.

A Village of 100

If you have a bed to sleep in, a refrigerator for food, a closet for clothing, if you have a roof over your head each night, you are wealthier that 75 percent of the world’s population. According to the Minature Earth Project, if the world’s population were reduced to 100 people, 6 individuals would control 59 percent of the world’s money. The “State of the Village Report,” originally published by Dartmouth professor Donella Meadows in 1990, was used to calculate the statistics which many of us have seen in the form of an email titled "Village of 100." If the world’s population were reduced to 100 people, what would our global village look like? Since 1990, Ms. Meadows’ research has been circulated through millions of email inboxes and shared in thousands of classrooms, mine included. The updated version published by the Miniature Earth Project includes recent population statistics from the UN and the Population Reference Bureau.

The statistics are overwhelming. An estimated 4.3 people are born every second around the world. Around 2.5 billion people do not have access to improved sanitation. Almost 2 million people died from tuberculosis last year. More than 500,000 women die each year from complications of pregnancy or childbirth. But it is especially hard for students to grasp the significance of such large numbers. Can you picture 2.5 billion people? How about 2 million? What about just 500,000? Students cannot fathom the enormity and the implications of such statistics. I would argue that none of us can. It is when these statistics hit home, when we put a face to these numbers that they have power. We discuss a similar sort of phenomena in class when we talk about Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night. It is shocking to hear about the Jews, political prisoners, mentally ill, handicapped, homosexuals – the millions and millions of people who died in concentration camps during WWII, but it is not until we can put a face to the horror that the numbers and the story become real.

Similarly, when our world population of 6.6 billion is reduced to 100, we can begin to understand the statistics. Yes, it is an over simplification, but it is one that we need to make the statistics real. It would mean nothing to my students if I told them only 1.98 billion people in the world have a bank account; it sounds like a rather impressive number. However, when I tell them that in a village of 100, if you have a bank account, you are one of the 30 wealthiest people in the world, suddenly the statistic starts to make sense. Seventy people do not have the means or the money to open a bank account, something all of them have. Or, instead of telling students that 3.5 billion people struggle to live off less than $2 a day, I have half of my class stand and tell them to think of our class as a global microcosm and those standing would have to find a way to clothe, feed, shelter, educate, and entertain themselves with less than $2 a day, the statistic comes alive. The numbers have a face. They become real.

So what do I do with these numbers? How do I help students understand their responsibility to our global community? Especially at the start of each semester, I am stared down by students who declare they have no responsibility to a larger community. “We all have to work for what we have, so everyone else should,” is a common first response. As the semester unfolds, students begin to understand that it is sheer luck that they were born when and where they were as most people in the world do not have it so fortunate. But even for those students who make that connection, fewer still understand the responsibility, connection, power they have to help those less fortunate. Is this a by-product of the American dream? Have we really all become so myopic that we believe the myth that it is possible for every human being to “pull themselves up by their boot straps”? One of the statistics that breaks my heart is this:

Of the industrialized nations, the United States has one of the largest populations living in poverty, about 17 percent.

It is pitiful that the wealthiest nation in the world does not even help its own people, let alone those outside her boarders. When did we stop caring for our fellow human beings?

(Statistics taken from the Population Reference Bureau)

The Power of Poetry

Next week I start my Teacher as Poet course through the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project (PAWLP), and it has sent me rifling through the dog-earred pages of my poetry books. I’ve been flipping through a book that I received last semester as a gift for participating in some committee or other. Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach is a beautifully organized collection of poems and essays submitted by educators from around the nation. The day I received this book I very clearly remember nearly missing my bus stop on the way home as I was absorbed in its pages, chuckling at some of the teacher essays, tears hovering at the corners of my lashes reading others.

The first poem that I flipped to this afternoon was one submitted by Jim Burke. As he explains in the essay accompanying his submission of a Seamus Heaney poem, “Through words, through poetry, [the students] cure themselves for that one hour when their hopes and hearts rhyme, while I sit in the back, bearing witness to their voices, their lives, and all they have to say if we can only find the courage to listen.” I wish I had remembered flipping down the page on this poem. I wish I could now give it to my student who turned to me and sighed, “What does it matter? Teenagers don’t have power, anyway. We can’t change anything.” Poetry has power. I want to find ways to share that power with my students, to feed even the smallest spark of hope until it burns like a fire within them. Poetry has that power. So now I’m thinking about ways to add more poetry into my curriculum.

From “The Cure at Troy” by Seamus Heaney
Human beings suffer.
They torture one another.
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.