I know I was meant for greater things than this. I mean I was born on an assembly line in Detroit, or maybe it was Korea, or Japan, or…but I digress. I rolled off the assembly line looking sharp and fine—a beautiful lime green 1972 Dodge Dart.
I thought I’d be leading the pole at the Indie 500, or escorting beautiful young ladies and their dates to Senior Proms, or at least driving a semi-normal person somewhere.
Instead what I got was a whole family full of insane teenagers, mostly boys, who took turns driving me into the dirt. If it wasn’t one thing—backing into the high school Poli-Sci teacher in the school parking lot—it was another thing—leaving me unlocked in front of the high school with the key inside so that anyone from anywhere could just hop in and take me for a ride.
The crowning insult was when my speedometer, gas meter, and pretty much else stopped working. Instead of giving me my well deserved rest, they just kept driving me. Everywhere. And, most embarrassing, if I ran out of gas, they just left me on the side of the road. It happened often enough that people began to laugh about the Decker Green Machine, out of gas again.
I finally gained revenge. One day as I was driving down to Show Low for the big football game, my driver made the mistake of attempting to go over 40 miles per hour in me. In protest, I broke my fan belt and propelled my fan blade 20 feet in the air, right out of the green hood, leaving a lovely little hood scoop where a fan had once been. It was a noisy protest, but it finally got results.
My mother passed on many traits to her children. Some of us have her jaw, strong and square; some of us have her skin, pale and freckled; and some of us have her hair, dark and curly. Other siblings have inherited her aversion to messiness and her anxiety about heights. I have had the misfortune of inheriting one of her less desirable attributes – her telephoning phobia. To speak plainly, making a simple phone call is more terrifying than donning a string bikini and swimming through a raging river filled with piranhas and crocodiles while being shot at with deadly blow darts.
Phone neurosis continues to be a hardship throughout my adult life. I put off calling until the last possible moment, and sometimes I even resort to (Gasp!) little white lies to cover up my weakness. I refer to a recent calling incident. My school has one of those really cool antique popcorn-popping machines. As teachers, we are allowed to use it for family and neighborhood functions IF WE ASK. A few months ago I made the monumental mistake of bringing the popcorn machine to a neighborhood movie night. Everyone was intrigued and envious:
“Where did you get that? Do you think we could use it for our next (den meeting, family reunion, formal dinner party)?”
Here is where I really messed up because, in the pressure of the moment, I said, “YES.”
Now people occasionally call and say, “Do you think we could borrow the popcorn machine next week?”
The problem is that this necessitates a phone call to my school to ask if the popcorn machine is available. Notice that I say phone call. Email does not work for this particular task. So, I add the phone call to my list of things to do: sort my spices, dig up the backyard, translate The Iliad. These are all obviously top priorities and need to get done before the phone call. Day after day important things come up, and the phone call gets pushed to the bottom of the list. Suddenly it is the day of the event, and I realize I still haven’t called to ask about the popcorn popper. What am I going to tell the neighbors?
I resort to those aforementioned little white lies.
“Oh, I’m so sorry! I’ve been down with hand, foot, and mouth disease and haven’t been able to talk for a week, so I couldn’t call and reserve it.” (Unfortunately, I can only use this excuse once, so I save it for a real emergency.)
“I’ve been meaning to tell you that UDOT dug up the whole street outside my school; the phone lines have been down all week, and I couldn’t call and reserve it.” (This excuse is usually good at least once or twice a year.)
Or, my personal favorite, “I called and left a message, but Mrs. Fitzgerald never got back to me.”
I really do feel guilty about shifting the blame for my personal inadequacies onto poor Mrs. Fitzgerald, but I don’t feel guilty enough to actually make the call.
They say that karma never fails to get you in the end, and that’s what’s happening to me now. My 23-year-old daughter Alison inherited my love of literature, my dislike of cats, and my phobias about telephoning. The other day she actually paid my teenage daughter Megan ten dollars to pretend she was Alison and call BYU to ask some questions about an upcoming senior seminar. If you ask me, I think Alison got off pretty cheap.
I wonder how much I would need to pay Megan to act as my personal secretary for the rest of my life . . . The phobia is oh so real. The rest of the details may or may not be true – you decide.
I see my students constantly composing: texts, notes to each other in class, silly sentences for grammar practice, lists of all varieties. I overhear the amusing and detailed things they tell each other, and I'm excited by their proficiency with words. But when they are asked to write for school, the work they turn in is generally less than stellar. There is a marked difference between their witty repartee in speaking and the dry delivery of their writing. Why is assigned student writing so often insipid, disinterested, and uninspired? In an article in the English Journal titled "Real-World Writing: Making Purpose and Audience Matter," Grant Wiggins says:
The point of writing is to have something to say and to make a difference in saying it. Rarely, however, is impact [emphasis added] the focus in writing instruction in English class. Rather, typical rubrics stress organization and mechanics; typical prompts are academic exercises of no genuine consequence; instruction typically makes the “process” formulaic rather than purposeful.
Thinking about some of the writing assignments I’ve given in the past, I recognize that my students felt that their writing didn’t exist outside of my classroom. They couldn’t understand any impact or genuine consequences that their writing might have. Could this dearth of imagination be the spark that student writing is missing? What could I do to ensure that impact – genuine consequence – exists in my classroom, writing workshops, and assessments?
Naming Audience
In an ideal world, every student piece would be published in a magazine or sent as a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. In the school world, this isn't always practical. It is still possible, however, to teach students to consider an audience as an integral part of every piece of writing. Students can’t really impact anyone with their writing if they don’t even know what audience they are writing for.
In her article "A Cure for Writer's Block: Writing for Real Audiences" from NWP's The Quarterly, Anne Rodier relates how she encourages her students to think about who might be the audience for the kind of writing they are doing. Who would care about what they have to say? As an example, in the classroom, students might write their memoir to share with a family member or a best friend. An argument might be directed to a parent or an organization. In the beginning, students often need help figuring out whom they could be writing to, but once they have someone or a group in mind, it often automatically determines the genre, form, and tone of what they are trying to write.
One additional thing that Rodier emphasizes is that even with genuine audiences, writers are still "employing craft," or in other words, writers are performing, or acting through writing, using a specifically chosen and crafted voice or persona to "tell the right story to the right person in the right way." When students are consciously considering how to reach not just any audience, but a specific audience, they are going to be more motivated to fine-tune their writing.
Informative pieces especially benefit from audience consideration. A student of mine who was writing an piece on violins remarked, “I am writing this for my cousin. She knows all about how to play a violin, but she doesn’t know how a violin is made. So, I am focusing on that.” It was interesting to see how naming an audience directed her research and her focus and made the paper come to life. She looked for something that her reader didn’t already know, a way to impact the reader, and because she did, she wrote a better paper.
Giving Choices
In my adult world, I generally choose what I want to write about. I’m often motivated to write about things I want to remember or change. When I compose a letter to my senator, it is because I have an issue to discuss that I feel strongly about. When I write in my journal, it is because I've had an experience that has touched or profoundly affected me in some way. I have a very defined purpose, so I feel (hope) that my writing will make an impact on the reader.
Students aren't always so lucky. Few of them would choose to write an argument or essay on their own. However, we can give back the power of impactful writing when we give them choice about what to write about. On TalksWithTeachers.com, Ruth Arseneault says that:
So, how do we give students choice? I think it has to go beyond a list of topics they can choose from. Students need to realize that they have choices when it comes to the way they write things as well. I have found that mentor text studies are very helpful for showing students that they can branch out beyond the five-paragraph essay and still write a powerful paper. Writers such as Rick Reilly, Leonard Pitts, and even athletes from The Players Tribune show my students that arguments don't have to follow a set structure. The claim can come at the end, or they can begin their arguments with a personal story -- and it can still work.
After the students submitted their own work, I asked them about the choices they made. One student said, “I didn’t realize that a memoir could be about an object. I chose to write about my blanket that I’ve had since I was a baby. Writing about it was actually fun, because it brought back so many memories. I chose to organize it [chronologically], but I could have done it by place, too.”
Another student said, “I hadn’t thought about how short a core memory could be. I thought I had to choose something really amazing or life changing. Reading "Chalk Face" helped me see that I could choose something kind of everyday and quick to write about that was just important to me. So, I chose to write about when my brother and I slid down our stairs on a big piece of cardboard. The whole story took about five minutes, but it’s something I will never forget.” These student reflections demonstrate that the choice of how to write was just as vital as the choice of what to write when it came to engagement.
Performing Writing
In the past year, I read an essay in front of a packed crowd, presented at UCTE, gave talks, taught lessons, and led discussions. All of these involved writing that eventually had a live audience of real people. When we make time for students to present their writing, we allow them to experience the genuine consequences of writing. Some of the many things I've tried in my classes are writing circles, debates, Socratic seminars, poetry slams, occasional papers, pecha kuchas, and even just the everyday sharing of quick writes with the rest of the class. Students had to present writing in some fashion in each of these -- from formal to informal -- and that expectation made all the difference.
An example of this happened last year when our grade level team worked together to have our students write job descriptions, resumes and applications for jobs as Santa’s elves. Some students were employers and others were the prospective employees. Tension and stakes were high for both parties, and students were highly motivated to write a great resume or detailed and concise job description because 1) other students were going to hear them read it and evaluate it (and them), and 2) they wanted the best elf job/worker (everyone wanted to make candy canes, no one wanted to clean up after the reindeer).
Part of this exercise included a job interview. Both interviewers and interviewees had an authentic experience as they wrestled with what questions to ask and what answers to give. Although no one was really getting a job at the North Pole, having a continual audience for everything they did made the assignment matter to the students. One student said, “This was one of my favorite things from last year. I worked hard on it because I knew that people in my class were going to see what I did. I don’t care as much when it’s just for the teacher. I guess I should, but I don’t.”
I also had my students debate each other as part of our argument unit. Watch below to see what two students had to say about the experience. Obviously, the opportunity to hear others and be heard themselves made them feel like they were making an impact with what they had to say.
Reaching Conclusions
In "Real Voices for Real Audiences" from The Quarterly, Joan Kernan Cone writes that student writers will always "play it safe" -- writing as little as possible, with as little voice as possible, and "writing not for an interested reader but for a mistake finder" until they have a reason not to.
I’ve found that giving students choice, finding an audience, and offering performance opportunities allows student writing to have impact – the impetus that students need to open their writing hearts and minds to us. If we don’t want to keep reading student writing that we know isn’t the best that our students can do, it is our imperative to help students find the impact their voices, thoughts, and stories could have on the world.
Authentic and Audience Friendly Writing Assessment Resources
When I taught at UCAS I used to do writing circles where we picked a topic and then wrote on it. I picked a different group to work with each time. When I was finally down to organizing the last of my filing, I found several of these pieces that I apparently never saved in a digital form -- here is one of them.
Gifting from the Comfort of Your Home
There are two things in life that I truly hate: calling people on the phone and shopping in the mall at Christmas time. Some people find it exhilarating and exciting to shop at malls when they are wall-to-wall people--I am not one them. I don't like being jostled, I don't like noise, and I most definitely don't like waiting in lines.
Because of this, I have become a dedicated internet shopper. There is something intrinsically exciting about getting packages in the mail. Someone has to do something to keep the postal service in business, right? Of course there are a few downsides to internet shopping--the shipping can be expensive, the clothes occasionally don't fit, and you have to do something with all those boxes. Speaking of boxes, I like to break mine down and get them into the recycle bin before anyone notices that I just got another eleven boxes in the mail. Heck, internet shopping is the reason I HAVE a recycle bin.
However, once you have destroyed the evidence, you are still faced with the dilemma of where to store the contents of said eleven boxes. If you follow my concept of complete anti-surprise, you will just leave the contents out on the counter, and the recipients have to pretend to be surprised when the items show up in their birthday/Christmas package a week later.
The real problem surfaces when the items you just ordered from the internet don't fit, or even worse but occasionally true, are rejected out of hand by the giftees. You are then faced with two choices: stand in a long line at the post office to mail them back, usually on your dime, or take them back to the mall/store where you will have to deal with crowds, lines, and noise.
Really, when it comes to shopping for gifts, it's a lose-lose world.
With today being a new term, I had the students scribble on the question: What does my ____________ reveal about me? This is what I wrote.
One thing that people often notice about me is my hair. I’ve
had a blue streak in my hair for about three years. All I’m going to say about
it is this: My hair is more of a decoy than a clue to my personality. Most of
my students this year assumed that I was a different person than I really am
just because of the blue streak – for example, they assumed I wasn’t a member
of the dominant religion. Having blue hair makes you seem like a rebel – but at
the end of the day, I’m pretty laid back. I would definitely NOT call myself a
conservative though – I’m pretty liberal these days – liberal in my love for my
fellowman, to quote my husband’s mother. As for my hairstyle, it’s more a
function of ease of care than anything else. For the past 15 or so years, I’ve
had my hair pretty short – as a matter of fact, for the past few years it’s
continued to get shorter and shorter all the time. This is entirely a matter of
ease of care rather than fashion. My hair is fine and curly, and it tends to
look better if it’s short – when it is long it just starts to go crazy.
Literally.
This is some writing I did at at Kimberly Hill Campbell's CUWP Saturday Workshop. It was based on two chapters we read from this sweet book.
Never for me the siren call of chocolate or licorice or gumdrops. Sweetness is not my friend. Give me sour, really sour, and please make it lasting. I despise candies that tease you with a sour burst before betraying it with a middle of unsatisfying bland sweetness. I prefer a sourness that lasts all the way through.
As a child, I satisfied this lust with Jolly Roger sticks, purchased for ten cents at the movie theater. One stick carefully peeled would last for an entire movie. As you licked and licked, the stick would slowly bend until you had a lovely curl just before it became so thin you could see through it and then it broke off in your mouth, giving you a quick burst of overwhelming sourness.
As I grew, I skipped the candy altogether and went right to the mother ship. I began eating lemons, not with sugar but with a little salt on them. Oh those were heavenly days, tucked up in a corner of our ranch house, curled up with a good book and lemons with salt. I still have some of my favorite books from my childhood, and all of them have yellow stains on the pages from errant drips of lemony-salty goodness.
As an adult, I am facing some of the ravages of a sugar coated and lemon juice filled childhood. I have had more than my share of large cavities, root canals, and caps on my teeth. Sometimes I even have nightmares that all my teeth are falling out. I've had to give up all candy binges, and my teeth are far too sensitive to indulge in lemons. Luckily I'll always have the honeyed memories of a sweet childhood full of blissful sourness.
So--I have a new job this year. I'm at Mountain Ridge Junior High teaching 8th and 9th grade English. It's been a whirlwind beginning of the year and overall pretty awesome.
I set up some genre example files per Nancie Atwell's new In the Middle book, and as I was doing so, I found a piece of my writing that apparently I'd never actually saved on any computer. I think I wrote this while I was doing writing circles with my former students. I rather liked it so I am posting it here. The next time I post, I'll give you a virtual tour of my new room, because, frankly, it's the coolest room ever.
The Beach Chair Test
They say that
confession is good for the soul, and mine can use all the help it can get, so I
have something fairly shocking to tell the world. Are you sitting down? Are you
listening? Here goes.
I didn’t wash my
car last year.
Isn’t that awful?
What’s worse is this: I don’t intend to wash it this year either. Isn’t that
terrible? And to make it even worse, I haven’t washed my car for at least two
years. The last time I remember washing my car was when the local high school
did it for free.
Washing my car is
one of the things I don’t do because it doesn’t pass my beach chair test. When
I’m old and relaxing at the beach and looking back at my life, I’m not going to
be saying: “Geez, I wish I’d spent more time washing my car. If I had driven
around town and up to work every day in a sparkly clean car, my life would have
been complete.”
Applying my beach
test keeps me from doing a lot of supposedly useful things from dusting
furniture to holding a grudge to decorating for the holidays. That’s not to say
I never do those things, because I do. It’s just that I give myself permission
to let things slide once in a while (well, maybe even more than that, but who’s
counting). Every year I put up fewer and fewer Christmas decorations. And you
know, I never regret it. When I’m able to spend the days after Christmas relaxing
and enjoying and doing things with my
family rather than rolling up thousand of tiny little white lights, then I don’t
mind that my house doesn’t look like it dropped right out of the Christmas
issue of Martha Stewart Living.
The best thing my
chair test does is to remind me that it’s better to do things than to own things.
I may wish I had taken more trips, gone to more plays, attended more live
concerts. As I look back, I remember the time and people and places and not the
dollar signs. It’s not likely that I’ll be thinking, “I wish I’d bought a
bigger house and a fancier car.”
Above all else,
the chair test is personal. A thing that flunks my test may be the number one thing
you’ll reach for from your beach chair, even before the little drink with the umbrella
in it. And that’s the beauty of the test—it guarantees that you always get what
you really want. And I believe that determining and reaching for what you
really want is both the beginning and the end of this little vacation we call
life.
As an ELD teacher, I am teaching way more vocabulary than I ever have before. I have found this book to be an invaluable resource. It combines vocabulary with writing skills, creativity and presentation -- a win, win, win for any ELD classroom. I can't recommend it enough!!
So far I have tried the selling a word (persuasion) strategy and the news story strategy (who, when, what, where, why), and both of them worked very well. Remember that these are students who don't like to write -- but they were able to do this and do it well enough to teach their classmates. Their retention was very good based on a quick assessment the next class period. The nice thing about it is that I let their peers assess how they've done -- if they know what the word is, they pass, but if the students can't tell me what the word meant, the authors go back and make their definition better -- real world instant feedback.
My good friend Dr. Chris Crowe recently posted a link to this article: How Visual Thinking Improves Writing. I've been trying a lot of visual things with my ELD classes this year, and it really does work. Plus, the kids have fun while they're learning!!
Last year I was invited to a special writing workshop introducing Debbie Dean's new book, What Works in Writing Instruction: Research and Practices.
As part of the workshop, we did some model writing. We looked at various book reviews from NPR, then we wrote our own versions based on what we noticed the reviewers doing.
Don’t Give Up on Memory
I’ve only fainted
one time in my life—after I gave birth to my first-born son. A be-scrubbed
nurse had just told that he was dying, and she was trying to get me on my feet
so I could see him for the last time. As I came out of the faint, I saw my
husband and the nurses’ concerned faces looking down at me, and . . . I
couldn’t remember what was happening and why I was on the floor. Within
minutes, my memory came crashing back, but I will never forget the immense
weight of it as I realized what was happening.
Memories
can do this. They can be heavier than mountains. They can add burdens and pain
to everyday life. Some of us may wish that we could get rid of our memories and
unburden ourselves. We long to be free.
In The Giver by Lois Lowry, an entire
nation has done just that. They’ve passed on the mantle of remembering to just
one person—know as the Receiver of Memories. At first the memory free society
seems like utopia. There is no anger, no violence, no fear.None of the baggage that comes with
memory.
But as the
book continues, Lowry reminds us that memories are also about love, kindness,
compassion, ethics, even basic morality. People without memories are people
without a conscience. Memory becomes something to treasure and to fight for.
As
for me, I re-read this book again immediately after I first read it, and then I
got up at 5 o'clock in the morning and took a two-hour walk to think about it.
It disturbed me, it shook me, it made me think.Even with all the painful memories I have --
particularly the death of my infant son -- I would never want to give up my
memories -- they are just too precious.
If
you are a person with memories, whether they are sweet, bittersweet or
downright painful, you must read this book.
I don't remember exactly why I was highlighting certain sections -- I think blue was personal connections, green was ? yellow was summary, and pink was my reaction to the book? I'll have to go back, find my notes, and check.
Edinburgh Castle, with the sign of our hostel just visible
Here is some writing I did at a recent CUWP Workshop. We were assigned to write about our best vacation, then we turned and paired and shared, and our partner suggested something we could expand on and explain more. This is a peer review technique where after reading a peer's paper, the student reviewer generates a list of questions she has about the topic. The writer takes the list and considers them, adding and updating his paper as needed. The section in blue is what I added after my pair/share partner asked me to explain what in the heck was a youth hostel.
Well, my best vacation ever, hands down, would have to be
last year's trip to England and Scotland with my husband and best friend, Mark.
We have wanted to go to England for years, and we finally decided to just go
for it. One fun thing about it was that we alternated between really nice
destinations and funky destinations, and so we stayed in 5 star hotels and
youth hostels (sharing bathrooms with teenagers) on the same trip.
What The Castle on the Rock Youth Hostel looks like from the front
One
particular hostel we stayed in was situated directly below Edinburgh Castle. Edinburgh
castle is an imposing structure situated directly on a giant rock. We would
walk out of our hostel, look up, and there was this amazing structure.
Youth hostels are a cross between extremely low budget
hotels and college dormitories. You pay for the use of a bed (bedding is extra). They generally have a giant common area and even a kitchen
you can use if you want to. There is only one bathroom for all the people who
are there, male and female (the showers and toilets, of course, are private). So, everyone is using the same bathroom, and you may be shaving next
to a 15 year old who is putting on all his Goth, complete with liner and
piercings. This disconcerted my husband a bit.
The front desk where we checked in every night
Luckily for us, though, we didn't have to sleep dormitory style; for a little bit extra we had a private room with one double bed and a sink. The room was called Antony and Cleopatra. We had to get the desk service person to buzz us into the hostel every night, and when he did, he would say, "Oh yes, it's Antony and Cleopatra."
The funky staircase, complete with Knight in Shining Armor
We also went carless and depended on our feet, taxis,
trains, buses, and the underground for all of our transportation, which was an
adventure in and of itself. We also had those fun little challenges that always
make our vacations memorable, such as rain every single day except one—so much
rain that the train we were traveling on from Edinburgh to London was washed
out and we had an entire day of rain delay. Oh, what a fun vacation it was.
So...I felt like it was a better mini-write with the addition, and I tried this with some success with my students. Some of them had some problems coming up with questions, but I think that is probably one of the best parts of this...both reviewer and writer have to do a little thinking.
What the common room looked like pretty much everyday we were there (minus the sun)
I'd forgotten all about this fable I wrote as an example for my students on how to change a simple story from their lives into a beast fable (using Chaucer's "Nun's Priest's Tale" and Jon Sciezksa's Squids Will Be Squids). Fun times!!!
My friend Joe over at Joe Average Writer posted a list of amazing writing prompts based on literature two years ago. I'm just discovering his list. Check it out; it looks to be a great resource.
I'm not posting it here because I don't want to steal Joe's hard work. If you click the link above, you'll go right to the page.
This looks like it will be promising -- I'll check it out over the summer for sure.
How Do You Find A Story In A Painting?
“Something pulls me like a magnet, and then I ignore all the others ... I stand in front of that painting, and I tell myself a story about it. - Tracy Chevalier
About Tracy Chevalier's TEDTalk: When writer Tracy Chevalier looks at paintings, she imagines the stories behind them: How did the painter meet his model? What would explain that look in her eye? She shares the story of Vermeer's most famous painting that inspired her best-selling novel "Girl With a Pearl Earring."
kid 1: I don’t understand why grownups drink coffee.
TWT: That’s a good one.
kid 2: Why do grownups like yoga? It’s so boring.
TWT: Write that down!
kid 3: Why are adults tired all the time, even when they wake up?
TWT: Another good question.
kid 4: I don’t understand why grownups drink pickle juice.
TWT: Pickle juice?
kid 4: My parents were having a party and I came downstairs and they told me to go back to bed because they were really busy drinking a lot of pickle juice.
I know I was meant for greater things than this. I mean I was born on an assembly line in Detroit, or maybe it was Korea, or Japan, or…but I digress. I rolled off the assembly line looking sharp and fine—a beautiful green 1972 Dodge Dart.
I thought I’d be leading the pole at the Indie 500, or escorting beautiful young ladies and their dates to Senior Proms, or at least driving a semi-normal person somewhere.
Instead what I got was a whole family full of insane teenagers, mostly boys, who took turns driving me into the dirt. If it wasn’t one thing—backing into the high school Poli-Sci teacher in the school parking lot—it was another thing—leaving me unlocked in front of the high school with the key inside so that anyone from anywhere can just hop in and take me for a ride.
The crowning insult was when my speedometer, gas meter, and pretty much else had stopped working. Instead of giving me my well deserved rest, they just kept driving me. Everywhere. And, most embarrassing, if I ran out of gas, they just left me on the side of the road. It happened often enough that people began to laugh about the Decker Green Machine, out of gas again.
I finally gained revenge. One day as I was driving down to Show Low for the big football game, my driver made the mistake of attempting to go over 40 miles per hour in me. In protest, I broke my fan belt and propelled my fan blade 20 feet in the air, right out of the green hood, leaving a lovely little hood scoop where a fan had once been. It was a noisy protest, but it finally got results.
They never drove me again.
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