Today’s Public Education in PA…
This is an article about an interview (which is also embedded at the bottom of the article) that gives an example of a giant hole missing in the public education of PA. I know that normally I write on here (and it was made for this purpose) about writing in the classroom and teaching experiences I’ve had so far, but this is something that I believe needs to get a following behind it. Watch the interview, read the article. It’s self-explanatory.
So I was able to get a glimpse into two separate classrooms at “Rydell High”.: one with Miss Lynch, who teaches 10th grade (Honors and Track 2) and 11th grade (Tracks 2), the other with “Frenchy”
who teaches 10th grade (Track 3, and Honors) and 12th grade (Track 2). On Friday, I spent the day in “Frenchy’s” classroom watching how she facilitates sharing and writing exercises. I was able to watch students’ reactions to each other’s writings as they were shared in front of the class.
I watched as senior, “Henry”, one of the quieter of the class, reluctantly got in the front of the classroom and read aloud a piece handed out by Miss Frenchy. It wasn’t even his own piece, yet he was still so nervous and anxious to get back into his chair. Miss Frenchy, however, knows what she’s doing, just as the authors of Inside Out: Strategies for Teaching Writing point out: “building confidence is our first job” (70). By getting the most shy students in the class up in front of their peers, leading discussion, she is trying to promote an open classroom environment, one where everyone’s writings can be shared and go judgement-free.
In her 10th grade classes, she had students volunteer to read aloud their assignment due that day. The assignment was: Imagine yourself in twenty years. Who is around you, what are you doing, what is your life like? Write about it.
There were students who got up and shared that they were going to be a lawyer with a family, one girl wrote that she would be hopeful to have Miss Frenchy in her life in twenty years (Frenchy was of course touched to tears by that); another girl wrote about how she’s never seen herself getting married, yet she had a son, was a single working mom, and she did her best to make ends meet (and her creativity–she began the piece in media res and finished it right where she began–was AMAZING). Some students shared about just how they had no idea what their lives would be in twenty years, but they wrote about what they aspired it to be. These students are amazing.
I was able to run a warm-up writing activity, and this is where the important part of this blog post comes. In Chapter 4 of Inside Out, the authors write about different writing activities to do in the classroom to open up the community, and get everyone comfortable. They, of course, touch on fluency, and how important it is to establish a routine and ritual in the classroom, so that students know “I walk in the room, I grab my portfolio from the shelves, and I open the binder up to a blank piece of paper, ready for the warm-up writing.” This exact routine is how Frenchy has her class structured (it’s still early in the year for them, though, so reminders are needed every now and again). As part of another assignment from another education course, I had to interview students. After telling Frenchy about my interview questions, she asked if I wanted to use one for the warm-up in the next period. Of course I wasn’t going to pass up that opportunity! My warm-up question was:
After the five minute writing was over, I asked for volunteers to share what they wrote about. After a little coaxing from Frenchy, reminding them of class participation grades, a dozen hands rose. As I pointed to each student, they, unprompted, rose out of their desks to “Stand and deliver“. The piece that stood out to me most of all was delivered by a very adamant student who focused on supplies needed in his school. (Let’s call him Jimmy.)
Though Jimmy’s idea would be quite convenient, to say the least, it’s so sad to me that students no longer wish the write out the things they’re thinking, but need to type them. With the increased rate with which technology is advancing, the internet is expanding, and the digital world is becoming more and more normal, it could be easy to think that writers’ fluency has increased right along with it. I have overheard students whine and moan about taking out a piece of paper to brain-dump for five minutes because they “can’t write as quickly as they think and they lose their thoughts more quickly.” This is a common sentiment with many writers!
Even the authors of our text books acknowledge that apparent “quasi-writing”s that are done daily by teens are actually writings, and therefore they help to increase fluency.
Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, then, because I really enjoy writing down on a piece of paper. And what happens if your iPad or laptop breaks one day? You need to know how to write, not matter what you’re writing, with a pen and paper. Either method increases students’ fluency, allows them to share out their thoughts and feelings in a comfortable space, and really allows for creative expression. I know as I was going through middle and high school, the iPhone wasn’t even a thing yet, there was no such thing as unlimited texting, and we passed notes in class
instead of sending a text message under the desk. The best part about writing notes to each other: you got to play with your own handwriting.
I think that’s so much more fun than using WordArt and fonts made up by the software companies. But maybe, again, that’s just me.
Also, by the way…the SATs, ACTs, and other standardized tests taken in an academic life requires the test-taker to copy verbatim a paragraph written in script.
So my previous post unintentionally prefaced this one.
The textbook we’re using for the class I have been blogging for is called Inside Out, and talks about the importance of writing in the classroom, and helps to break down just what those important reasons and skills are that students will learn. In Chapter 1, the authors talk about the importance of grammar in students’ writings. Grammar, though important, is most definitely not the most fun to teach, and especially not to learn. The authors mention how easy it would be to just be able to teach writing as one “whole”, meaning everything would just come at once. But if we teach everything all at once, emphasis is lost on important elements of writing: fluency, grammar, structure, vocabulary, etc. By breaking it down one bit at a time, the students can then master one element at a time. Obviously this has been the practice since the beginning of written-language curricula, so I’m not saying anything new. As someone, though, who really respects and appreciates correct grammar (which in my definition includes spelling, too) I still see severe mistakes in students’ writing–not just grade school students, either, but university students who are in my age group–and it makes me worry a bit about what will happen to those students who don’t quite grasp the importance of the precise placement of a semi-colon or a comma; a capital letter or a dash. What about the differences between a dash and a hyphen?? (The latter question is one that I can tell is definitely going amiss in the classroom. I don’t think that it’s being taught, really, at all!)
Having this question in mind over the last couple weeks while sitting in my field placement at a local high school (we’ll call it…Rydell High…y’know, like from Grease
),
which is an English classroom of 10th honors and regular American Literature and 11th grade World Literature, I started to pay more attention to their writing. My teacher
(let’s call her…Miss Lynch 
. Yup, another Grease reference.)
gives her students lots of writing assignments–the school just, in fact, switched to a writing-based instruction–and I was able to look at their writings. Keep in mind, these are Honors students, so their grammar was pretty phenomenal, but of course not perfect (few of ours is, though). However, last week I was able to read through some free writing they did and turned in for an administrator’s research about teacher qualities and I noticed a lot more students struggling with their grammar when the assignment wasn’t laid out for them in steps like their last assignment I had read.
The first assignment I read of theirs was a short piece about what it means to be American. This was a finely tuned, typed-up piece and from it, they were to choose their favorite line to include in a class-collaborative poem about what “American” means. The activity/project was phenomenal and eye-opening to both the students and to myself. I think ‘Miss Lynch’ knew generally what to expect from it. However, in the process of choosing these first lines, I was asked to help students narrow down their decisions. It was at this point I was able to read some of their work, and I noticed some over-excessive comma-usage and a few tense disagreements, but other than some small errors in mechanics, what stood out to me more was misspellings. By 10th grade, there are certain things that students, I would think, are almost masters at. Spelling pluralities of singular words definitely should be expected. (For example: tragedy –> tragedies)
So I saw a few of those from a few students…not a huge deal, but something that as a grammar enthusiast and an English teacher, I catch quickly and hang on to it until it’s fixed. However, when I pointed it out to Miss Lynch, especially after this student attempted to correct his classmate’s use of the wrong form of “there, their, or they’re” (and even though his correction was, in fact, correct), she simply shrugged and told me
This kind of threw me off-guard until the following Tuesday in another of my Education classes when my professor, Jodi, said something that tied it all together for me. She talked about her 9 year-old daughter coming home with misspellings in her work from school. She explained to us (specifically the English majors in the room who cringed at hearing that she spelled words like “grandma” like “Grnma” for a while because she just wasn’t hearing the “a” there) that this was a method of using phonics. I’ve had a Reading Specialist class before, and knew what learning phonics does for students (in fact, I learned phonics in elementary school), but I still didn’t understand until she said “for some teachers it’s more important for the student to hear the sounds of the word and learn the spelling, than memorize and never know why they sound like that.”
I guess the same goes for grammar. If a student over-uses a comma…well…at least we know he/she knows that there is a short pause where the unnecessary comma is placed. If there are tense disagreements…well…at least the correct word is there, and that gives us, as the teachers, something to point out to them. It took me a LONG time to rid my writing of tense differences. It took a teacher pointing it out to me and working with me to understand what I was doing wrong. That’s where we come in.
This critiquing and individual attention not only helps students’ understand grammar, mechanics, and spelling, but it improves their fluency a little at a time, and it’s the fluency of writing that I think seems most important.
I came across this post today on Buzzfeed.com and found it hilarious. I figured, as teachers who love to write and who teach writing, others would find it just as funny.
“19 Jokes Only Grammar Nerds Will Understand:
Knowing the difference between your and you’re.
There, their, they’re.
Subordinate Clauses.
“I watched the TED Talk “Amy Tan: Where does creativity hide?”, and holy cow! I knew that she was an amazing writer with quite a complicated background, but I didn’t realize just how much she had been through. In her short story “Two Kinds”, Amy explores the relationship between her mother and herself, and how she reacted to her mom as a child. (The story is called “Two Kinds” because her mother, while young Amy butts heads with her, left Amy some wisdom about children: there are two kinds of children, the kind that obey their parents and the ones who rebel. As a child, Amy was forced to take piano lessons, and after a horrifying and scarring performance, Amy decided to forever give up on the piano, forcing her mother to give up her dream of having a famous and successful child. With her dream, Amy’s mother also seemed to give up any hope and apparent love for her daughter. The two did not talk much the whole rest of Amy’s life, right up until the day Daisy, her mother, died and left Amy the piano on which she took lessons as a young girl.) However, it was not until this TED Talk that I realized both her brother and father died relatively young! A death of such close family members is a struggle, to say the least.
She is funny, charismatic, witty, and so intelligent. “Creative” is a word that should not even need to be mentioned when referring to Amy Tan because her writing says enough of that itself. However, in her lecture she helps us define what it means to be creative. She says specifically that it’s asking questions; questions about life events (“why does it happen?”, “how does it happen?”, “what did I do to make this happen?”) are what Amy says to keep in mind when writing because those questions will help drive a story’s events and reactions.
She doesn’t give the word “creativity” a definition because it is more of a concept than anything, I think we can all agree. What she does give is a process with which one can work and better their creativity. She says not to “tell the audience about it because then all you’d be doing is saying what it is.” Amy is definitely an advocate for the “show, not tell” philosophy of writing (as am I). She also seems to work best with metaphors. She says her worst habit is constantly finding associations between things in life (“And I find a lot of them”, she says.). This is to take the initial object or idea and find is meaning–why is it there?–and thus, eventually, finding the meaning of your story.
Amy mentions some theories of where creativity comes from, and where the writing process takes you that included beliefs such as:
Creativity comes from a part of the brain that not everyone has
“The Uncertainty Principle”–always asking if what you’re writing or thinking is correct or the right way of thinking.
“The Cosmological Constant”–That moment when your focus becomes clear and you begin, as the writer, to notice little “hints” but realize that those little “hints” have been there, obvious, the whole time. I interpret this idea as a moment of epiphany; that moment when as you’re writing and worried that you’re not going to direction you’re meant to go in, you look back and you realize just what it was you were to be focused on, and at that point, it all makes sense.
Her final bit of information was that you, as the writer, need to put yourself in the setting, in your writing. She literally goes to the village multiple times of which she was writing, but I don’t think that it needs to be interpreted so literally, especially when many writers create settings from their imaginations.
So, with all of that in mind, I would like to connect Amy’s advice and breakdown of the creative process to teaching. How can we as teachers (and future teachers) cultivate and support such creativity in our own students? I know my classroom will more than likely just SCREAM creativity, as an English classroom. However, I know that not every student I get in my desks will be of the same “I LOVE TO WRITE, AND I LOVE ENGLISH” mindset that I am in every moment of my life. To remedy this, and try to nurture creativity from those students a good place to start is always going to be with exploration of individual interests.
In high schools all over, students are no longer required to only read one book with the rest of the class, but they are given an opportunity to choose among three books or so, allowing them to decide to read a book that will (hopefully) hold their interest. The same can be done with writing assignments! Allowing students to choose for themselves shows that we, as the teachers, care about what they want. I sincerely believe that creativity is within every human being, it just needs to be brought out and the best way to do that is to allow them to individually explore their interests. When anyone is more interested in one topic other the other, they’re going to be excited to do almost anything surrounding it.
If a writing assignment isn’t one that cannot really stray from the point of the assignment at all (for example, maybe the assignment is to demonstrate some themes in The Great Gatsby), use your own creativity first and give the students different modes of demonstration. For instance, (sticking with the idea of demonstrating themes found in The Great Gatsby) allow the students to choose among writing a responsive essay, or creating a visual representation (when I first read Gatsby, we created a timeline of themes, motifs, and symbols, for example) of their choice and write an explanation of their project; you could even try to give a creative writing-based assignment to allow students to show their understandings–re-write the novel in a present-day setting, for example.
Giving the students options and the opportunity to take the assignment however they see fit allows those students to be as comfortable as they want to be with the assignments. We can’t force students to be “creative”, but we can support them and be welcoming to their level of comfort in the creative realm.
My name is Heather Shalita.
I am an English major with a minor in Secondary Education in Pennsylvania.
I am passionate.
I am articulate.
I am excited (and exciting).
I am creative.
I am always learning.
I am curious.
I am open.
I am interested (as well as interesting, if I do say so myself).
I am a traveler.
I am a writer.
I have been a writer since I knew how to string words together on a page. I’ve always loved to write stories, both about myself and of the fantastical. I was asked on the first day of class: “If you could write a memoir about your life, what would it be titled?” Though I still don’t quite know the answer, the title does not matter. It’s the content, the style, the voice used that matter more.
Everyone is a writer. It’s just a matter of honing those skills to draw out one’s ability. It is then our job, as teachers, mentors, and role models to help students find their greatest abilities. Through the course “Writing to Improve Literacy” I hope to learn some of the best ways to help myself and my students find their inner-writers.
Student Teaching 