NH literacy journeys

Welcome to the end of October when the leaves have faded and are falling in piles… Kathy commented at the end of our last set of posts that helping her daughter with her college admissions essay was a challenge. It made me think about how hard it is to coach, encourage, support and challenge writers to improve their work.This week my seniors have been cleaning up drafts for college admissions. I struggle with two things:

• How much should I help? One student wrote an essay about raising his younger brother. The entire piece is tell. Writing teachers learn early on to teach writers to “show not tell,” so that they focus on specific details and make the experience live for readers. I reminded him of this lesson and underlined places where switching from tell to show would improve the piece. Today he had draft two for me to look at, and it is all tell. I asked him what he changed. He found a few mechanical things. I reminded him of my comments and how I had hoped he would try showing what he meant. Now what should I do?
• How can I best maintain the balance between honesty and integrity as a reader of poor writing a student has produced while still encouraging the student to keep working at it? I read an essay today and the drumbeat in my head was ‘cut,cut,cut.’ The student rambled on without a lot of conviction about overcoming a fear. It sounded like something someone told her to write for admissions; it sounded nothing like her. I searched for a few lines that I could tell her were good, but there were so few. This admissions process is already terrifying. I don’t want to destroy this writer, but I want her to write better. What would you do?

I’m hoping you’ll think about your own history as teachers and writers and offer me some advice. I want every student to leave my class believing he/she can write well; I want to give them the tools they need to make that happen. But what do I do when they won’t use the tools or can’t seem to?Tell me about your experiences in receiving feedback from people on your writing. What hurt? What helped?

Hello colleagues,As part of our adventure this semester, I thought we should enter the world of blogging. I know many of you have blogs or contribute to blogs, but one devoted to our work in literacy at the high school will be something new for all of us. A blog has several advantages. I like that I can log in while watching Jon Stewart reruns after dinner and our usual hike with the dogs. I like that I can read at my own pace, without watching the clock to see where I have to be next. And I like that threads of conversation begin in a blog that we often don’t have time for in the daily rush of high school life. I hope that this blog will not be a burden, but an opportunity to extend the conversations we begin in our class.I hope you will write a response to this post about your own literacy journey. Consider experiences that formed you as a reader and writer. I’ll give you mine.I was always a reader. I distinctly remember the night I learned to make sense of letters on the page. I was holding Dr. Seuss and sitting in our living room with a swirl of adults around me babbling and eating and just being adults: uninterested in children (at least in my experience.) I kept sounding out individual letters and blending them and all of a sudden making words and sentences. I was exhilerated: I knew reading was big news, big opportunity. I still feel that way. The last time I kept track I read 90 books in one year. Which means of course that I don’t do lots of other things: I don’t cook much, my yard is full of weeds…you get the idea.As for writing, well I used to hide a book of stories in my sock drawer as a child. As much as I loved those books I read, I really just wanted to be one of them: I wanted to be an author. For years I was convinced it would never happen, but then it did. I write a lot now. I write to figure out what I have to say about all kinds of things. I love writing and hate it with equal passion. My writing will never match what I believe it should be, but I get a lot out of engaging in the process and learning as I go. So now it’s your turn….Penny