Anita Bushell: writer and editor
December was a full, yet short month. Adding a new close-reading initiative, in preparation for the state exam in March, made it even fuller.
A welcome end came with the last day of school and an activity period. Students did winter-themed word searches and crossword puzzles, while snacking on cookies and candy canes. They also watched The Grinchand listened to holiday music.
It was a beautiful thing.
Perhaps it was the location. Maybe it was the size of the group. Then again, it could be the cookies.
The last three days of school were spent celebrating some 7th graders. This was not a whole class activity, though. We were honoring the 90% -- those students who, since September, have consistently done the right thing in the classroom. They make up a silent majority, but they struggle in their own way against those students who are more vocal.
In every class I’ve taught, I’ve tried to champion these students – no easy feat, when you realize how much time is devoted to the 10%. The moment of truth comes when you have the space to have a conversation with one of these students and you are horrified to discover you barely know them.
Outside the head-of-school’s office, we sat at a large table, talked, did a free write, and ate home-baked chocolate-chip cookies. Some groups were more successful than others. There is always a dynamic. The most joyous one, in my opinion, was the one where there were constant smiles, laughs, and lots of writing.
What better way to start the Thanksgiving break?
And then there were the seventh graders.
A portion of them is struggling. There are behavioral issues, and a memory lapse of what school is all about. Still, they come every day and make some kind of effort.
The bigger picture is that writing is hard, no matter where you teach. Some students will get it, and some will not. For those that will not, it’s much harder to catch up because writing, unlike math or reading, is not concrete. It is personal.
Then there is the pandemic, with its masks, and sneeze guards, and community-busting mandate. Where does one even begin?
In addition, our school is in the struggling neighborhood of Brownsville, where 36% of residents live below the federal poverty line, and 44% of adults are unemployed. It also is home to the largest concentration of public housing in the U.S.
Oh, and then there is that little matter of adolescence, including hormones, and an I’m-not-going-to-listen-to-anything-you-say attitude. A winning picture, overall.
And yet, amidst all of this, the seventh graders put together research papers on the Holocaust. Some were rudimentary, reflecting all the work that needs to be done this year, and some were extraordinary, showing thought, effort, and tenacity.
Somehow, there was order out of sheer chaos.
Okay, they didn’t all read their own work. Some of them wanted to but asked me. As usual, I was honored.
The eighth graders worked so hard on their personal statements, and we finally got to the publishing party. About half the class shared their pieces, and the most-covered topics were overcoming challenges, and learning to ask for help. I was so proud of the effort they put in, as well as their ability to accept gentle support in making their writing stronger.
At the end, there were homemade chocolate chip cookies and popcorn. Not a bad way to end the week.
They wrote about anxiety. They wrote about depression. Finally, they wrote about death.
This week’s writing prompt: how did the pandemic affect you?
Some of them didn’t want to write about the pandemic. That was fine. I wasn’t going to make them. The point was to get everyone writing.
Then there were the share outs. This is where it got really interesting. One class did really well with respectfully listening to their classmates without comment. The other class, not so much. Also, some students asked me to read their pieces. Their subject matter was too painful for them to read. I was honored they asked.
These Friday writing sessions have been a powerful reminder of how important it is to give students agency and a chance to be heard. Just one of the many reasons students should write as much as possible.
For the first time since school started, the seventh graders got to read their writing.
It was the day before Halloween, and they were in costumes. It was time to give them a break and have some fun. What was so encouraging was seeing how excited they were to do some creative writing and sharing it out.
Now it‘s time to do this on a regular basis. We owe it to them.
I shared the news that Abdulrazak Gurnah had won the Nobel Prize in Literature with my eighth-grade writing class last week.
Gurnah began writing in a dairy when he was forced to leave his native Zanzibar for England in 1964.
“Miserable, poor, homesick, he began to write scraps about home in his diary, then longer entries, then stories about other people. Those scattered reflections, the habit of writing to understand and document his own dislocation, eventually gave rise to his first novel, then nine more — works that explore the lingering trauma of colonialism, war and displacement.” – The New York Times
I encouraged the students to write in their journals at home. For Gurnah, it all started with a diary, I told them.
“Can I apply for that prize?” one of the students asked.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks.
Some highlights: all the students in the school practiced their cursive skills for a Brain Breakfast activity (time before Homeroom starts). I walked around and observed. Everyone seemed happy and engaged. Interesting note: one teacher observed that some students were having more trouble than others. We both agreed that those who struggled less probably had some cursive training in elementary school. Those who struggled more probably did not.
Another highlight: an eighth-grade student came up to me in the hallway and told me how much she enjoys our writing class.
“You made my day!” I told her. “Thank you!”
Indeed, I asked her if she writes outside of school.
“Not so much,” she answered.
“Let’s do something about that,” I encouraged.
When asked to use the word “why" in a sentence the boy wrote “Why do I need an education?”
What’s fascinated me about this is that I thought only the adults were, in the wake of the pandemic, asking the big questions.
Students, however, after a year-and-a-half of uncertainty, are questioning a lot of things as well. Especially at the middle school level, where they would be testing the limits even in a pandemic-less year.
And many of them struggled with remote learning and may not have even signed on at all. Being back in the building then, on some levels, is all new again.
Perhaps one reason we need an education is to learn how to learn once more.
Ah, that eighth grade class. When I walk into that room, I am living the dream. They are ready, respectful, and roaring to go.
On Friday, I was covering for my co-teacher and I was on my own. We talked about the lesson — we would be reading Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter, and I fully assumed they would want to read on their own, then we would discuss as a class. One young woman raised her hand and asked if they could possibly work in groups. Up to now, they had been reading Poe, and she found it much easier to read with her peers, rather than having to go it alone.
We came up with a plan. Students would work together for twenty minutes, then we would re-group to see where we were. The timer went off, and I began circling the room. What I saw was simply beautiful: students standing and reading for each other, having great conversations about addiction, and domestic roles, and simply behaving like true scholars. Most importantly, there were no behavioral issues to get in their way.
It was, quite simply, a gift.
Favorite moment of last week: an 8th grader dancing in the back of the room to Conjunction Junction, the Schoolhouse Rock video that connects you with and, but, and so.
What this series did so brilliantly is they made the thing you needed to learn fun – in this case conjunctions – by adding catchy tunes and groovy graphics. Oh, and they aired them on Saturday mornings on ABC during the kid’s TV programs. Basically, you were watching a cartoon between the cartoons, but you were learning at the same time, not just being passively entertained.
And with Conjunction Junction, you got a rhythm-and-blues song that my generation still refers to. I can just picture the backup singers and lead they hired for the gig.
Hence the happiness: “This is good!” the 8th grader told me, flashing me a big smile.
“Raise your hand if you like writing,” I said. Several hands went up. “Now, raise your hand if you don’t like writing. And be honest,” I added. Lots of hands went up.
The sixth graders came back on Wednesday, and by Thursday we had jumped right into The Legend of Sundiata, the West African tale that The Lion King is based on. My co-teacher and I took turns reading, then we began a character discussion: who are the main ones and what are their motivations?
By the end of class, I heard students putting away their writing materials while asking each other questions about the story. “Wait, did he die?”
Maybe some of the students don’t like writing, but they were all completely engaged in the story.
Which is, of course, what writing is: storytelling.
You do something for long enough and you don’t remember how you learned to do it in the first place.
That’s how it is with paragraph structure. I’ll be teaching it this week to the sixth grade and I have to re-learn how to break it down, from the claim and the context to the evidence and the analysis.
This is going to be hard because writing, in general, is hard. I heard that last week when I was doing some research on the Writing Revolution, and it was a very helpful reminder.
Writing is hard and the only way to understand the process is to learn how to break down the steps and identify the parts that make it up.
Some books you simply miss. Your school didn’t read it, or you moved that year. The Outsiders is one of those books.
I also didn’t see the movie, so I was completely unaware of the story when I picked it up to read for my sixth grade class this fall. What is astounding is not only how beautifully it is written but the fact that it was published when the author graduated from high school.
“I knew I was going to be a writer. I love to write. I began in grade school, because I loved to read, and liked the idea of making stories happen the way I wanted them to. By the time I was in high school I had been practicing for years.” – S.E. Hinton
The Outsiders would be a tremendously powerful novel to read when I was an adolescent, but it is simply devastating to read as a parent.
I am looking forward to the deep conversations I know I will have with the sixth grade this year.
I’ve always wondered why my uncle and my dad, both products of the New York City public school system, turned out to be fine writers. They knew how to write well, and they understood the mechanics of writing.
Turns out they had been taught. A 2012 article in The Atlantic perfectly outlines the problem: recent writing teaching focuses more on engaging students with fun assignments in fiction and memoir rather than instructing them in the nuts and bolts of sentence structure and grammar. Now the backlash has begun.
My argument is that you can do both: embed the spelling and grammar in the fiction assignment and you can show students that they can have fun while writing and learn how it all comes together.
Next week, I’ll be starting a new job as a middle school writing support instructor. I am so excited about learning with my students about writing at this level.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/
“I never write down a word until I know exactly what I want to say.”
This statement was made by my advisor in graduate school. And I’ve wrestled with it ever since.
It all started because I overwrote and struggled with outlines. The professor asked me to rewrite my thesis several times.
And over the years I’ve had multiple conversations with other writers who have argued against this idea. “I write precisely because I need to figure out what I’m going to say,” my friend Clifford Thompson told me.
Here’s where I think this concept does work well: the academic assignment. Working with high school seniors on the Common App, I do not ask them to write a draft. We focus our first sessions on brainstorming their ideas, then, only when we are sure about what they are going to write, do we get to the sentence structure. I even find myself telling my students it would be harder to cut back their writing rather than expanding it in the later stages.
After all this time, I finally get what the professor was getting at.
There’s a lot of dictation in the rapid talking, speed typing, black-and-white-film His Girl Friday.
Cary Grant’s on fire brain does not stop, weaving yarns, spinning tales, and delivering headlines via his star reporter and recent ex-wife Rosalind Russel. What’s fascinating is that a team – Grant and Russell -- crate their headlines together. He throws his ideas at her, while she bangs them into her Smith Corona.
While I wish I could be either Grant or Russell I will say that several years ago, I discovered dictation as an invaluable tool for the disconnected writer. Such a student is one who tells you their great ideas but struggles to get them down on paper. They stop, they stare into space, there is silence. There is a disconnection between orally delivering their story and writing it down.
There are dozens of articles online about the use of dictation as a writing tool both for older and younger students, as well. Perhaps my discovery wasn’t an accident at all, now that I think about it. I had used Patsy Cooper’s wonderful When Stories Come to School when I taught storytelling with the little ones in preschool. Possessing only their oral skills, their stories often come out so naturally that the printing and paper piece of the endeavor never comes into play. Except that sometimes the stories come at such a rapid pace – not unlike those of Grant and Russell – that you have to ask the student to “slow down.”
One of the most satisfying dictation sessions I’ve ever had took place last week with a new college applicant. We brainstormed her ideas, and I wrote down what she was saying, because it was coming out so naturally. Before I knew it our session was over. It felt less like a writing session and more like a conversation.
And that is what we’re aiming for.
“I hate writing,” – a third grade student
“School assignments are so boring,” – a fifth grade student
“You do what for a living? I couldn’t stand writing when I was in school.” – an adult
I hear comments like this all the time. It is the recurring theme in my work with students.
When I first started working as a tutor, I assumed I would simply help students become better writers, polish their work, and clarify their message.
What surprised me was the visceral reaction some students, as well as adults, had when a writing assignment or even the subject of writing came up.
Was writing, for some, the equivalent of being forced to sit at the dinner table and finish some unpalatable food as a child? Did writing elicit an almost PTSD response in others? What was the story?
Naturally, my curiosity lead me to start doing some anecdotal, as well as formal, research on the subject.
While I am still in the process of doing the formal research, I will take a few moments to report on some of my experiential findings on the hatred of writing.
The baseball story is the one I always recount because the third grader who starred in this story was my best writing teacher ever. I was a Learning Leader volunteer at P.S. 282, in the early 2000s and I was assigned to work with a struggling third grade student. At our first session, we worked alone in a classroom, and I tried everything I could to get him to do some writing in his notebook. Nothing. He was unresponsive. The clock ticked. Finally, as the period came to a close and I had absolutely nothing to show for it – proclaiming myself a complete and utter failure in my newfound role as a writing teacher – I grasped at the last straw I had: “What do you do when you’re not in school?”
The student paused, looked at me, and quietly said the word “baseball.”
“Baseball?” I asked.
“Yup, baseball,” he responded. “I play in a little league.”
After that, I could not get this formerly reticent student to stop talking about little league, the positions he played, and the uniforms he wore. The only trick was to get him to transfer all his many thoughts to paper. Moral of the story: kids need to be engaged with their writing.
The assignment is another story I like to recount because it speaks to the difference in the way we teach writing now. When I was in high school and college, I was expected to write the final paper on my own. It was assumed that the tools were given to you over the course of the semester and that you would plan and execute the paper by the last session. While that works for some students, for others, it’s a lot of pressure to build that house on their own, regardless of whether they have the right tools or not.
As a graduate education student, my final project was written with my class. In other words, we spent the semester working on each chapter together, with the professor supporting us along the way. It was like a set of teams doing a jigsaw puzzle together versus a group of individuals doing their own puzzle. At the end of the semester everyone had finished their project and the professor didn’t have the unenviable task of chasing down those who were pulling all nighters, trying to finish the bloody thing. Lesson learned: writing collaboratively is more productive than doing so in isolation.
The tyranny of the blank page is one more example of the kind of challenge I’ve seen young writers face. When I started teaching early childhood I noticed that some three-year-olds knew exactly what they wanted to draw when given a blank piece of paper. For others, they had no clue. What was worse, that blank sheet of paper seemed to stare them in the face, challenging them to create something when they had nothing planned.
I’ve certainly seen this with writing students, as well, that empty notebook demanding they create something original and noteworthy. Some students will rise to this challenge. For others, the task is overwhelming, and they need support breaking it down. This is where brainstorming comes in.
Brainstorming is collaborative and the teacher helps students come up with their initial thoughts. It is an excellent tool for those who have great ideas in their heads but have trouble executing them on paper. The takeaway: It always helps to share your ideas with others.
A final thought is on the use dictation to elicit writing from struggling students. There are those who can tell you their story but cannot seem to write it down. There is some kind of disconnect. “Tell me the story,” I once said to a fourth grader, who had amazing ideas and could even put them into full sentences but could not write them down on paper. We tried something different. He dictated the story to me and I wrote it down. Then I read it back to him and he wrote it down, including his final revisions. What we learned: There are other ways to get your ideas down on paper.
These are some of my mid-summer musings on the craft of teaching writing. I look forward to continuing my formal research as we head into the new school year.
With students back in the classroom, there will be many challenges to address, using both formal and anecdotal research.
“Dear Little Red Haired Girl,” Charlie Brown writes. Or “Dear Mom and Dad.”
Letters are a big part of Peanuts. Sometimes they were printed. Sometimes they were in longhand. They are a reminder of the era when we wrote letters to friends and relatives on paper. Some of us even saved all our letters.
The art of letter writing, while mostly lost, is a great summer tool for teaching students how to organize their thoughts, practice cursive, and tell a story.
My sixth grader has taken off for California, but we agreed that we would be pen pals while he is there.
Time to run out and make sure I have those Snoopy stickers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/books/art-of-writing-letters.html
Putting it all together. That’s what we did with an essay over the past three weeks.
My rising sixth grader found a subject he was interested in – the beach – and we brainstormed the elements he would include: the sun, sand, ocean, snorkeling, and a refreshing glass of lemonade. Then we got a graphic organizer, put all the elements in order, and wrote them down, using connecting phrases between the paragraphs. At the end we did a final read, revising as we went along. The last step was typing it up.
One of the things we talked about is that an essay can seem overwhelming when you start but if you break it down to its parts and you focus on each one at a time, it’s not so bad, after all. In the end, you put it all together, just like a puzzle.
Oh, and another thing. Writing this out in cursive helped the student practice his handwriting. Another win.