NH literacy journeys

Like all of you, I read this article with a mixture of wonder and frustration. So few adults read anymore, so no wonder our students do not read, and rarely read deeply. Plus, the superficial standards and expectations that come out of state departments of education undermine what we believe we need to be teaching: to read, write, and think with clarity and power.What to do?Su gave me an article from Harper’s that I found interesting. I liked this quote in particular:Once you’ve pressed the ON button, the TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your heard. A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not ‘interactive; with a set of rules and options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it. ~Ursula K. Le Guin, “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading”I like all of that quote, in fact, except that last line. I want to add, not everyone is up to it YET. Because I do believe we can teach students to read deeply like she explains, and we can build stamina in adolescents so that they can tackle challenging texts. But I’m afraid there are too many short cuts that students access (like Spark Notes) and so they skim through high school not reading much at all. As Newkirk said, they become better readers by reading a lot, so how do we make that happen?I look forward to your thoughts…Penny

John Merrow’s article brought up several things for me. I found myself nodding in agreement to his thinking around rewriting. It is important for students to write, yes, but more important that they get feedback and rewrite. My students make the most real progress when they go back to revise something several times. But of course this means that they may not produce as many final products in the end. Which matters more: lots of adequate first drafts or a few sterling last drafts? It’s that same old argument about trying to do too many things at the surface level instead of digging deeply into learning fewer things in whatever content we teach. We all battle with this: so much to teach, so hard to teach it all well. How can we build rewriting into our courses so that students realize the value of the writing process?I appreciated how frank he was about the conditions in different public schools in this country, since it is a real injustice and one that fires me up. After five years as a student teaching supervisor in Michigan where I visited inner-city Detroit schools in the morning, then the wealthiest Bloomfield Hills suburban schools in the afternoon, it is an issue that still eats at me. He said, “We have, increasingly, two worlds: the comfortable and smug world of wealthy public schools, and the underfunded and inefficient schools in which the poor are isolated.” Why is this true in this country? We have good conditions here at our new high school, but we can easily remember how different things were just last year. Why should some students have opportunities determined by where they live and what taxpayers in that district can afford? It’s just not right.Lastly, I pondered the way he taught when he didn’t know what levels meant in his school…when he looked at his students and imagined what was possible, instead of setting his expectations based on the label they carried to class. It’s a trap; we all know it. Sometimes my best writers are the CP students that are blended in with the Adv in our writing course. How do we work around leveling students in high school?At the end of the article he said, “I go to school and feed off the energy and youthful optimism of students and the dedication of the best teachers. I regain my balance and optimism and leave rejuvenated.” Thanks for helping me regain my balance every time we meet.I look forward to reading your responses to this article.

It is often said that high school teachers perpetuate myths about college work that are wrong. This week you visited a college class and met with former Kennett students to talk about the transition from high school to college. Please post your observations, questions and wonderings so we can discuss them in class. In particular, how well is the Kennett curriculum preparing students for the literacy demands of undergraduate work? I look forward to reading your thoughts.Penny

As I read Gillespie’s Reasons to Keep Teaching, I couldn’t help but nod in agreement. We share many of the same reasons for working so long in a profession that is so challenging. I found myself connecting most deeply with #8…in my case, teaching WRITING gives me a chance to make a claim for an art form I love and value. I believe in writing as work where no one ever becomes a master, as Hemingway said. Because each writing piece has its own challenges, the problem solving that we must use to get to the best piece of writing we can make is unique. I love the surprise of writing. It is never dull for me.Today in class the students were working with themes for their compressed autobiographies. Joe told me he is going to do a visual of a guitar, and on each of its six strings he will write about each of his six years at Kennett, from 7th – 12th grade. Across the room Allie was creating the story of her life through shoes, from purple jelly sandals to high heels. Matt is creating all he’s learned about buffalo wings and Alex has a school bus with memories from each year in each window as she moved from sitting behind the driver in first grade to sprawled across the back in 12th. Writing allows for student voices and student imagination. I love this work.

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