English

My students don’t remember an entertainment landscape that didn’t include around-the-clock reality shows. More than 750 reality shows aired on cable television in 2015, 350 of which were brand new. From talent contests to quirky families to dating hopefuls, reality shows appear to be scripted, but in fact, they aren’t written until all the footage has been shot. During the editing process, the director and editors look for patterns, storylines, opportunities for tension and arcs as they create the narrative. All scenes that don’t support the narrative end up being cut away, which is one way I often explain writing revision to students.

For the purpose of generating writing ideas, last week I asked students to pretend they had a camera crew following them around for 24 hours. Students recorded everything they did for the previous 24 hour days by jotting down a word, a clause or a phrase. Instead of writing just “work” or “school” or “homework,” I asked that students write a short description of what they were actually doing as if a camera crew was shooting footage. What was the scene? Who was in the scene? What were they doing?

The key to this activity is to ask students to look at their own life as if it were a reality show, looking for questions, patterns, significant moments, and meaning. Watching as an audience or an outside observer allowed students to create distance and objectivity. I also asked students to use a third person pronoun to refer to themselves instead of using “I” and always write “the subject, ” as in “the subject made a tuna fish sandwich.” Once students compiled this list, we pretended to be producers looking at 24-hours of footage for a controlling question or a claim that could be proven or challenged by the reality of this footage.

In the documentary film “Sherman’s March,” filmmaker Ross McElwee’s burning question at the beginning of his quest was: how did Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s military approach during the final months of the Civil War effect the South today? But right before McElwee embarked on a road trip to follow Sherman’s footsteps, his girlfriend dumped him, and the march took on a very different pursuit, namely as Vincent Canby’s 1986 New York Times review states: “Is romantic love possible in an age of supermarkets, fast food, nuclear arms and the sort of lightweight camera and sound equipment that allows anybody to film his own life?”

In Elizabeth Barrett’s 2000 Appalshop documentary “Stranger with a Camera,” she states her controlling questions in a voice over throughout the story of Kentuckian Hobert Ison and filmmaker Hugh O’Connor: How is a camera like a gun? Can filmmakers show poverty without shaming the people they portray? What are the responsibilities of any of us who take images of other people and put them to our own uses? What is the difference between how people see their own place and how others represent it?

After students recorded their 24-hour camera footage, I asked them to look over their scenes and extract a broad controlling question. This question could render a multitude of great starting points for informational and argumentative texts. Wording their claim or counter claim in the form of a question helps students see the subject from various angles. A question requires students to assume a pursuant stance in order to answer it. Documentary film makers often call this a controlling question. It’s the question that clarifies and focuses the shooting, production, and arrangement of the film. Here are some of the questions my students extracted from their 24-hours of “footage.”

How does one’s differing forms of entertainment influence their completion of everyday tasks?

Can reading and music have a positive effect on procrastination and completion of school work?

Do certain daily activities affect the quality of sleep?

How sleep deprived are high school students?

Does high school wear down students?

Is there really a life outside school for students?

Can being antisocial be crippling?

How does one balance dreams and reality and what is the price of trying?

Does engaging with passion breed discontent for other things?

Are teens not reading books anymore?

Are teens depressed?

Are students riddled with anxiety?

Does a church community benefit a student’s overall day?

Does politics have to lack good humor across party lines?

Are messy people good at anything?

Why do we sometimes avoid things that make us happy?

Can someone be social, yet not?

Why is fiction such a great escape?

When does obsessive become too obsessive?

Can a person have a relationship with God without being religious?

Can someone talk like a prick and walk like a good friend?

Is sloth bad?

How does participating in a sport affect a high schooler’s life?

Are stereotypes about teenagers accurate?

How can you balance school with everything else you want to do?

Can a busy high school student still be content and relaxed?

How does one withstand the mind-numbing grind that is high school?

Are teens too attracted to technology and their phones?

Are we expecting too much from students?

Why do some try to replace human interactions with non-living things?

Notice there’s a disproportionate number of questions dealing with fatigue, expectations, procrastination, technology, introversion, and social anxiety, all topics that weigh heavily on teens today. I did this activity on the first day back from Winter Break, so we were all dying a little inside which explains the dark undertones of these questions. However, these questions make great starting places for both argumentative and informational texts, writing that is pulled directly from their lives.

This morning I met with a group of students and two teachers to launch a mobile writing lab at Lafayette High School. This writing lab pilot is the brainchild of the Lafayette writing committee, chaired by our writing resource teacher, Holly.

We don’t have the physical space for the kind of writing center you might see on a university campus where students make appointments with a tutor to discuss writing assignments. We also don’t have the staff to supervise such a venture. Also, a before-school or after-school writing center wouldn’t be able to serve students who have no reliable transportation.

Many of our students need one-on-one or small group assistance with their writing. Our writing committee also wanted to support our large faculty, who assign writing tasks, but need help with the time-intensive process of brainstorming, drafting, revising, and editing necessary for quality writing.

This program allows teachers to “check out” writing teaching assistants (TAs). Similar to reserving a computer lab or a tech cart of laptops, teachers can reserve one or two tutors through an online app. The TAs will email the reserving teacher an intake form which allows teachers to describe the writing aid they need. TAs will then attend the class and provide the requested assistance.

In November, the English department recommended students whose writing, speaking, listening, and leadership abilities positioned them as naturals for this role. From these recommendations, Holly invited fifteen students to participate in the pilot and attend the training this morning.

After Holly discussed the nuts-and-bolts of reserving a TA (in a future blog, I will hyperlink examples of how we set up our teacher intake form, our teacher feedback form, and our running record of TA work) she asked students to introduce themselves and tell a story about a writing assignment that had been difficult for them.

Sharing writing war stories was a great place to start the conversation about writing tutoring. One must come to the table with respect for the difficult task of writing, and empathy and understanding are the cornerstones of any good teaching foundation.

After we reviewed our writing TA manual (a Google folder full of brainstorming strategies, graphic organizers, research resources, plus a bell and lunch schedule and a list of our faculty, their rooms, and planning periods) I asked TAs to test their tutoring chops by role playing with one another, using anonymous student samples. One sample was an argumentative essay about the most important word in Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech.

“What might you say to this student?” I asked.

“I might ask her if she thought she took a long time to get to her point,” Kris said.

“Okay. Pretend I’m the student who has written this essay. What might your opening question be?”

“Do you think you took too long to get to your point?” Kris said.

“No, I don’t. I think it’s good,” I said in the role of the student and pushed the essay back across the table toward Kris, who laughed, immediately realizing he had backed himself into a tutoring corner by asking a yes or no question instead of an open-ended question.

“A student will give you a yes-or-no answer if you ask a yes-or-no question, and the conversation comes to a grinding halt, right?” I said. The group shook their heads, yes.

“I would say to the student, in your introduction you make a lot of good points, but you need to get to the point sooner,” Kenna said.

“So yes, that’s clearly what needs to happen in this introduction, but what kind of question can you ask this writer that will allow her to arrive at that same conclusion?” I said.

“Let me try,” Leslie said. “I would say, I like how you have a lot of good points, but where is the main point that you want to make? Can you underline your main point? And what other points come before the main point?”

Leslie had it. She was leading the student to make an independent discovery about the writing instead of fixing it herself. She was using inquiry to move the student writer toward a solution.

“Think of the adage, give a man a fish, he eats for the day; teach a man to fish and he can feed himself for life. You can fix a peer’s writing today, but that only helps him once. Or you can show him how to think through his writing independently and become self sufficient. ”

As the training continued, I was so impressed with how empathetic our TAs were and how they were using inquiry to assess student needs. This on-the-spot diagnostic inquiry requires a TA to 1) access the student’s need, while 2) figuring out the best way to help the student meet that need, while 3) forming a question that will lead that student to discover the answer to his own problem. This kind of formative assessment is a skill many actual teachers struggle with, but it’s the key to meeting students where they are.

So, our TAs have been trained and are ready to be checked out Monday morning. Holly and I are excited about tracking the data and feedback we get from students and teachers on the efficacy of this model. Stay tuned to hear more about this process!

In 2004, I left Kentucky to pursue a graduate degree as a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin. I was recently divorced, a walking crisis of faith, and I entered a program primarily peopled with students who were much younger. They both wrote and partied hard. I was reeling from a life rent-in-twain, reexamining every truth I’d ever held sacred. Getting out of bed every morning and walking to the coffee shop around the corner was a victory.

I graduated from that program and returned to Kentucky in 2007. I came back with a new understanding of myself, the world, and my place in it. I now look back on those three years with all the grace that a decade of distance can bring to wilderness moments.

Another Michener Fellow, Jesse Donaldson, has recently published a book of essays, an extended argument to convince his wife to move from Portland where they presently live to Kentucky where he grew up. Each essay is titled as one of the 120 counties in Kentucky. On October 22, Donaldson launched an ambitious book tour to read his book in every county in the Commonwealth. Yesterday he came to my classroom to read a portion of his book and to talk to my students about writing. He brought with him another Michener Fellow, Greg Koehler, a Texas poet, who was along for a portion of the tour.

I teach writing in a creative and performing arts program at a large urban high school. Students who audition and are accepted into the program stay with me for four years, so I am exceptionally close to the juniors and seniors, who were the audience for Greg and Jesse’s reading.

Tuesday morning: my classroom was dim, lit by festival lights strung across the room. Fifteen juniors and seniors sat in a semi-circle. Jesse read from his book and talked about writing with such wisdom and generosity. My students listened intently. I was aware of how proud I was of them, so smart, that they understood what good stuff Jesse was dishing out and were honoring it with their attention, their interest.

After Jesse talked, Greg took over and read a poem called “Kentucky River Dirge,” a poem he had written during our time in Austin, based on many of the conversations he and I had had about my longing for home, my own nostalgia for the land of my birth, and our mutual love for soil and all the metaphorical power of the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. (Thank you, Wendell Berry.)

As he read the poem, I heard lines I had forgotten I uttered, emanating from a time and place I no longer visit, in a voice I no longer use. In a moment, I was both 50 and 40 years old, both graduate student and high school teacher. Both the wrung-out, strung-out Austin Liz, and the contented, comfortable Kentucky Liz.

Of course, to my students, these lines were merely poetry. As if.

To me, they were sodden afternoons at the Crown and Anchor, so many cigarettes, so many Texas backyard midnight parties, so much reeling from the lost tethers of church and family, a reminder of my struggle to find footing by telling those stories of tobacco and smokehouses. Greg transported me, not only a decade back into my life, but to my childhood as I followed my father to the field, burning tobacco beds to receive the seeds, to my mother’s own stories of sleepwalking along the roof of the smokehouse.

And there I sat, in all my respectability, in my lanyard and my ring of keys, listening to an anthem of a person I once was, rolled out in language. Hanging in the air, among the lights, among my students. Actual words. Hung on lines of poetry, tied together in an activity we call writing. An activity that I ask my students to engage in daily.

I wanted to pitch myself headlong out of my chair and roll around on the floor. The revelation of this moment, the wrecking juxtaposition. Worlds colliding. My precious students, my old friends, my memories, all occupying some metaphysical space in Room 303.

But even more profound was my wish to impress upon my charges that writing had the power to do all this, to transcend time and resurrect people we once were and allow us to live in both present time and at any time in the chronicled history or in history that has yet to exist.

When I was in high school, we used a textbook that divided writing instruction into different rhetorical modes: description, exemplification, narration, process, comparison and contrast, classification, definition, cause and effect and argumentation. While newer textbooks are now organized thematically —Jim Burke’s high school reader Uncharted Territory (2017) is a good example, organized topically by education, freedom, identity, and relationships—we often still draw those instructional lines when teaching argumentative, informative, and narrative texts as if each mode had different aims.

We English teachers love classifications because they help us process information. I am guilty of divvying up writing skills and processes into isolated categories, and I’ve often sacrificed authentic student writing, creating expository boundaries where none existed, for neat and tidy curriculum units.

But real writing resists all that – good writing is especially resistant to classification. It’s good because it’s clear, artful, and has achieved its purpose, not because it has followed a pre-determined form or met the properties of a specific mode. In any given text, the three modes delineated by the Common Core—argumentative, informative and narrative—are blended to the point that the reader isn’t struck by disparate text forms but the gestalt of the whole essay. How would one characterize Oliver Sack’s A Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers or Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Heinretta Lacks? These are texts which tell a story to enlighten the reader using data and scientific research surrounding a critical argument that serves as the heart of the work. Is Skloot’s book a narrative? Yes. Is it an argument? Yes. Is it an informational text? Yes.

As Andrea Lunsford attests in her book, Everything is An Argument, I would assert that Everything is a Narrative and Everything is Informative, and all of it is born from the writer’s creativity and critical thought. When strict distinctions exist between argumentative, informative and narrative writing, students begin to think of modal boundaries as inescapable territories beyond which their writing must not pass, even though the authors of the Common Core do concede that “skilled writers many times use a blend of these three text types to accomplish their purposes.”

“For all a rhetorician’s rules/Teach nothing but to name his tools.” – Samuel Butler

Writers determine their product by their own need and urgency to communicate and their (perhaps) vague awareness (at the outset) of their rhetorical situation. On the occasion of publishing his first novel (after working as an award-winning short story writer for his entire career), George Saunders wrotean essay for The Guardian about his process of writing his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. He says it’s a mistaken notion to think a writer has something to express and then he just expresses it. “We buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same. The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.”

Saunders’ claim – that the expression of an idea doesn’t become fully clarified until one begins to actually write and its birth is shrouded in mystery and pain – doesn’t apply only to fiction writers or writers working at a certain level of sophistication. As a writer myself for forty years and a teacher of student writers for nearly a quarter century, let me testify: all writers struggle similarly and mightily.

All writers, at every level, attempting any expression, enter into an exasperating and blind process. It is only after the writing is finished that it’s seen as following a similar pattern represented within a certain house of discourse. Once I left my high school English classroom, I never once thought of those modes because I never again found writing situations so nicely diced up.

During the first week of school, my goal is two-fold: I want my students to see self-discovery through writing as their main goal, and I want to build a community based on story. I use activities that encourage students to meet each other through the details of their lives. These stories and details eventually serve as the fodder for personal essays, arguments, and informational texts they will write later in the year.

Demographic grouping is one activity which asks kids to group themselves by various identities and meet the other people in the room who share that characteristic. The key to this activity — for both community building and self-discovery– is to ask kids who find themselves in a demographic group to argue for or against their own inclusion based on their life experience, hence stories. When they find themselves in a circle of Capricorns, for example, they need to tell stories and trot out evidence as they share the details of who they are or who they think they are.

For a 90-minute block class, I use three demographics: Myers-Briggs, Western astrological signs, and birth order. I want students to share stories about what it’s like to be a part of these subsets of the larger population, and I want them to challenge or confirm their placement in these groups. Do they agree or disagree with their “label?” What stories in their lives support or negate this assessment of who they are? Do the definitions fit?

The first demographic congress we convene is around the 16 personality types founded in Carl Jung’s theories on psychological types as listed on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Students take a 10-15 minute quiz which will then place them in one of the sixteen possible combination of four paired personality traits: 1) Introversion or Extraversion; 2) Intuition or Sensing; 3) Thinking or Feeling; 4) Judging or Perceiving. Based on their answers to the personality quiz, students will be given a four-letter personality, such as INFJ.

Before class starts, I post the 16 individual personality types around the room along with a brief explanation of each type. Once students have their types, they migrate around the room and find their Myers-Briggs compadres. For fifteen minutes, I ask them to trade stories that confirm, negate, or qualify the personality type by which they’ve been labeled.

In addition to being a fun, engaging activity which generates numerous narrative opportunities, I also get to see where my dreamers, my leaders, my risk takers, and my nurturers are.

After that, students divide themselves by their zodiac sign. The Western astrological signs are based on which month of the year you were born. According to astrologists, planetary formations at the time of birth can determine a person’s individual character. I’m surprised every year by how many students do not know their zodiac sign.

Before class, I print off a generic description of each of the 12 signs and post these around the room. Students migrate to the mini-poster that bears the symbol for their sign and join the others in the room who were born under the same sign. As they did with the Myers-Briggs grouping, students spend about 15-minutes reading the descriptions of their sign (they especially love to read the section about relationship compatibility) and share stories in these groups as to how they are alike or unlike their sign. This is a great activity because it immediately creates kinship among disparate students in the class based on their birth month.

The last grouping I do is birth order. All the first born, middle, youngest or only children get together in groups. I will have printed off descriptions of the characteristic of that particular birth order, and the groups discuss whether they agree or disagree with the definition of their particular rank. Birth order is a great nugget of teacher information for me as well. I know first and only born kids are often my natural leaders, and when I select group leaders for inquiry sessions later in the year, this information will come in handy.

Once we’ve circled through three demographic groups, I ask students to return to their seat and write a reflection of the activity, such as what surprised you about the descriptions? Did you strongly agree or disagree with any of the demographic groupings in which you found yourself? What was the best story you told today? What was the best story you heard today?

Fifteen years ago, I taught at a high school in a mountainous area of eastern Kentucky. Kids who qualified for free or reduced lunch made up more than 70% of the student body. There was zero diversity; nearly everyone was poor and white.

In these classes, I had very few Johns or Marys, but I did, once, have four Michaelas, spelled Mikkalya, McKalya, Machala, and Michaela.

(Incidentally, one of my colleagues, who had just moved to Kentucky from California, admitted to me that she was thrilled to see names like Latosha and Tionna on her rosters, thinking how diverse her class populations would be; she was stunned when she walked in the first day and saw that everyone was white.)

One day in the teacher’s lounge, another colleague railed about student names.

“It’s ridiculous! Who names their kid that?”

“Crackheads,” another teacher said.

“And they get furious if I mispronounce it,” she said. “Why should I be expected to know every crazy name like this?”

After teaching for 19 years, I have had my share of Blaydes, Jaydiens, and Sh’naes. And I strive very hard to learn how to correctly pronounce their names and then call them by their name every chance I get.

Maybe the parents believed giving their baby a unique name would be at least one distinction in a life where no other achievement would be forthcoming. For whatever reason a child has been given a name, when she walks into your classroom, that name represents who she is. Whether they love or hate their name, whether they are the embodiment of the otherness their parents had hoped they would be or not, their name equals their identity.

As teachers, who hope to use our influence to lead students to greater self-awareness, we must begin by honoring our students’ names— ergo their identity—by pronouncing their names correctly. Butchering a kids’ name is an alteration of their identity, and it creates nearly a colonial imbalance of power.

I once had a student who was born female with a female name, and with the support of her family, decided to transition as a male with a gender-neutral, non-traditional name. All her teachers had met with the family and had agreed to make the name switch on a designated Monday. She went home identified as one gender with one name; he came back to school identified as another gender with a different name.

On that day, I wrote his new name on the board as we were dividing up into reading groups.

“Whose ‘Skailer’?” said another boy in class, who pronounced it, “scale-er.”

“That’s me, and it’s Skailer,” said the transgendered boy, who pronounced it “sky-ler.”

“No, it’s ‘scal-er’,” said the first boy.

“Says who?”

“Says phonetics.”

“It’s my name,” he said. “I guess I know how to pronounce it correctly.”

English teachers might wail at this story, wringing their hands and bemoaning the corruption of the English language and the necessity of preserving the purity of the mother tongue. But I’m not one of them.

The Common Core has my back, stating that students should understand that language “usage is a matter of convention, can change over time, and is sometimes contested.” Students should be alert to political doublespeak and sloppy language that showcases slopping thinking, but I do not believe teachers should stand their linguistic ground on the backs of the poor girl whose teenage mother had stars in her eyes when she named her daughter, “Auroar’eh Eshtellha.”

Teachers, be proactive. As soon as your rosters are available, print them off and review the names. Seek out faculty who may have had the student the previous year. It’s a rookie’s mistake to stand up in front of a class on the first day of school and call roll, botching every name on the list. It embarrasses the kids and makes you look like an idiot. Instead, seat the students in alphabetical order, and while they are occupied with filling out a getting-to-know-you worksheet or an intake form, you can creep quietly around the room with a clipboard, point to each student’s name, and ask, “What would you like for me to call you this year?” Some of them may prefer a nickname that bears no resemblance to their given name. Then write the name phonetically or in a way that will help you remember how to say it correctly, and repeat it over and over and over to yourself until it sticks. Use it every chance you get. Greet them by name when they walk in your door every day, and say good-bye to them by name as they leave.

You and your students—all your Dollyeias, Kirandas, and Brook’lyns— will be happy you did.