Teachers Writing
With Their Students
being part of the
process, part of the community..
January 9th,
2007
Meg Petersen
When Donald Graves was asked, “ If you had to
choose one thing teachers should do when teaching writing, what would it be?”
He replied, “Write yourself. Invite
children to do something you're already doing. If you're not doing it, hey, the
kids say, I can't wait to grow up and not have to write, like you. They know.
And for the short term and the long term, you'll be doing yourself a favor by
writing. All of us need it as a survival tool in a very complex world. The
wonderful thing about writing is that it separates the meaningless and the
trivial from what is really important. So we need it for ourselves and then we
need to invite children to do what we're doing. You can't ask someone to sing a
duet with you until you know the tune yourself.”
“People don’t know how hard it is to write,
what a struggle it is to know what you want to say and then to say what you
mean. ~Jane Kenyon
In telling the stories
that must be told, storytellers inform themselves, and when the story is
shared, their readers discover their own stories. As they read my story they hear their own,
and as we share these stories we survive our lives. ~Donald M. Murray
A line from William
Stafford’s poem “Practice” has stayed with me for years: “Maybe it is all
rehearsal…maybe your stumbling saves you.”
This stumbling, which is what revision is like for me—stumbling to find
the precise words, stumbling to speak the truth, stumbling to express myself—is
what my writing demands. It’s not easy,
but it’s essential. ~
In writing you work toward a result you won’t see for years,
and can’t be sure you’ll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith.
It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a
surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel
it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it. ~Tobias Wolff
I believe that each
person not only has a story to tell, but that each person has a story that
matters. ~Brady Dennis
You don’t write
your whole life, but the vivid parts that have stayed with you. ~Kim Stafford
We are all apprentices in
a craft where no one ever becomes a master. ~ Ernest Hemingway
Close the door.
Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what
other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the
one and only thing you have to offer. ~Barbara
Kingsolver
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to
handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. ~John Steinbeck
What’s in my writer’s notebook?
I encourage my students to conduct
fieldwork on their own cultures and themselves.
Together we can take dictation from
the world.
Kim Stafford
Life….mine
Lists of all kinds of
things: stuff I need to buy; people I need to talk to; memories that come to me
Notes to myself –reminders
and important things I don’t want to forget
Emotions…anger, sadness,
excitement, wonder
Memories
Every vivid memory holds some
essential truth about your vision of the world.
Kim Stafford
Fragments of life that
strike me (that’s weird…why did that
happen?)
Drawings: especially when
I can’t write anymore about something but I’m still thinking about it
Photographs, postcards,
receipts, messages, notes from friends
lots of stuff glued in
like a scrapbook
Questions
Quotations that make me
think and respond, “Yes, that’s exactly how I feel.”
Song lyrics
Secrets
Doodling & responses
to quick writes or other writing exercises (a place where I experiment)
Scratch outs, cross outs,
messy writing, notes in the margin of a page, sideways writing
Attempts at poetry;
playful language
Writing pieces I abandon
because I lose interest or have no confidence in
Writing prompts I create:
things I think will help my students write
Story, essay, novel
titles—my wishes for writing pieces I haven’t written
First tries with a genre
I’m not comfortable with
Detailed sketches of
people and places to practice descriptive writing
Ideas for my classes, my
new teachers, my own current writing project
Things I don’t want to
forget to do
Things other people say
that strike me as important or stupid or that I don’t understand
License plates (4U2NV)
that make me want to respond
Books I’ve read and what
I thought about them…sometimes I stop reading and write, then go back to
reading, but I often need to put the authors exact words in my book so I can
really think about them and how they connect to my life
Visuals: plate, heart,
hand…with related words for memories or ideas for essays
Poems I love &
photographs of people I love
Life…mine
The world is busy, but the mind
tenacious.
The writing life is all about faith
in a fragment.
Kim Stafford
“One of the ways that I engage students in
writing on a continuous basis is through quick
writes. Several times a week, at the
beginning of class, I put a short piece of writing on the overhead projector
and ask the students to do a quick write.
A quick-write is a 1-3 minute written response to a short piece of
writing ...in which I ask students to either write as quickly as they can all
that comes to mind in response to the work, or to borrow a line (one that I
suggest or one of their choosing) from the work and write off (or from) that
line.”
~Linda Rief,
Voices from the Middle, Vol. 10, No. 1, Sep. 2002
Why Quick
Writes?
Research
shows that the following instructional techniques, all of which apply to quick
writes, encourage better writing. The
writer should:
1.
Write
frequently.
2.
Concentrate
on main ideas.
3.
Reread
what one has written.
4.
Organize
one’s writing.
5.
Support
claims with supporting details.
6.
Use
a distinct and recognizable voice.
Reasons
for your students to practice writing quickly:
- You learn to work from a stimulus.
Your students’ work with quick writes will help them lasso a
fundamental idea and develop it, then wrestle it to the ground. It
prepares students for standardized tests.
- You learn to get off the mark quickly.
With practice writers get their ideas moving more quickly. Their first line moves closer to the
emotional center of the piece.
- You begin to recognize your natural sense of
organization. Practicing quick writes helps you
organize your thinking around meaningful topics in a variety of ways.
- You can identify the emotional center of a piece
and provide supporting information. Quick writes become a laboratory for teaching writing
essentials.
- You connect conventions to context. Since quick writes lead authors to
topics they care about, they will more likely attend to conventions as
they write and refine the text.
~Donald
H. Graves & Penny Kittle, Inside
Writing, Heinemann, 2005.
Quick Writes for Teachers:
Write
about a time in your classroom or in your teaching when
·
something
disturbed or puzzled you
·
you
let go
·
someone
or something surprised you
·
you
felt like quitting
·
you
were frightened, or frightening
·
you
did something drastic
·
something
wasn’t said
·
something
happened with a parent
·
something
happened with an administrator
·
something
unexpected happened
·
you
thought you knew someone and suddenly found that you didn’t
·
something
happened with a class pet
·
something
happened on a field trip
·
something
happened outside of the classroom with your students
·
you
learned from your students
·
your
assumptions were challenged
·
you
felt ridiculous
·
a
colleague treated you with disrespect or ignorance
Other
writing exercises:
·
I
Am What I Am...define yourself as a teacher with no apologies
·
Respond
to poems, books, news articles or movies about our profession.
o
“Trouble
with Math in a
o
“Eleven”
by Sandra Cisneros
·
The
bureaucracy of teaching/professional development/certification
·
“Peer
Response” by Meg Peterson: a teacher responds to teaching with poetry
“Why memoir? It
means the world becomes yours. If you
don’t do it, it drifts away and takes a whole piece of yourself with it, like
an amputation. To attack it and attack
it and get it under control—it’s like taking possession of your life, isn’t
it?” ~ Ted Hughes
FIVE REASONS
TO BRING YOUR WRITING INTO YOUR CLASSROOM
from: ~Donald
H. Graves & Penny Kittle, Inside
Writing, Heinemann, 2005.
1.
Writing with students builds relationships and
nurtures respect among all writers in the room.
2.
Writing with students teaches them to see things
from a new point of view.
3.
Writing together creates energy.
4.
Modeling your decision making process helps your
students to see that the process is on-going.
5.
Writing with your students saves time.
And five more:
1.
Writing humanizes our students for us, and
humanizes us for them.
2.
Writing gives all of us a place to pause and
reflect together.
3.
When we are writers ourselves, we are better
capable of understanding and responding to the challenges our students face as
writers.
4.
Writing is empowering for all of us. We speak with
our own voices. At the same time, writing is the great equalizer. We all
struggle when faced with the blank page.
5.
When you write with your students you fundamentally
change the nature of what you are asking them to do. Writing becomes a
meaningful act.
Most of us aren’t good at modeling as we could be because we’re too
uptight about it. We think modeling is mostly (not totally, but mostly) about getting it right. We’re
not into showing students how it’s done so much as showing them how it looks
when it’s done well.
~ Vicki Spandel, The 9 Rights
of Every Writer, 2005.
Getting Started:
There are several ways you can go about writing
with your students:
1.
Participate
in quick writes with them in class and share your quick writes with them
2.
Bring
in a draft to read to the students. Before you read, tell them the parts you
are struggling with and ask them for their help and feedback.
3.
Bring
in a draft of yours to workshop in a fishbowl with a small group of students in
front of the class. After the session, you can ask the class what they noticed
that was effective in giving or receiving feedback.
4.
Write
your piece on a transparency and talk about the choices you made as you wrote
it. (This can also be accomplished with a computer projection system.)
5.
Write
a story with characters who are their age—this gives them the authority because
they are more knowledgeable about what it is like to be their age today.
6.
Show
your writing process as you work through your drafting, revision and editing
processes. Make your writing public.
7.
Publish
your writing with them in shared publications.
What you can demonstrate as you write with your
students:
1. How to choose a topic
2. How to get inside a
subject, to experiment with different approaches to a topic.
3. Rereading a text—how
to be a critical reader of your own text.
4. Conferences—how to
seek response to your work. How to ask good questions.
5. How to use author’s
notes.
6. How to revise by
re-seeing and rethinking
7. How rewriting can be
revision
8. Editing for language
(this can be shown on an overhead)
9. Caring about your
writing and how it will read to a real audience.
10. That writing is a
lifelong pursuit and not merely something that you do in school.
11. That we are all
apprentices to a lifelong craft.
What you do NOT demonstrate as you write with your
students:
1.
Perfect
writing
2.
The
one correct way to do the assignment
3.
Your
own brilliance as a writer, which they could never approach.
To Love the Silence Meg Peterson No one told you that to teach them to
write, you would have to learn
to love silence, but you must. It will feel at first like a scratchy wool
sweater against your skin. You will chafe against it,
try to fill it up with
any empty words so as not to have to feel
it. You need to move into
those silences, as if they were private
rooms you must enter, but never
fill. No, you must learn to
wait. Sometimes the hum of the
lights will seem deafening. or the scratching of pens
in a ten-minute free write, the stray cough, or
clearing of a throat… Sometimes you will hear them breathing. And you will know the
wonder of twenty separate souls living out their lives,
in the same place at this very moment. In the quiet, we breathe
in another’s words, after the writer has
turned the last page. In silence we take it in,
absorb one’s vision into
twenty others who have entered it
through her words. Yes, you will have to
befriend the stillness, that perfect respectful
pause, in which the whole world
is moving.
Peer Response
Meg Peterson
“ I like your hair,” said the boy
who’d frosted the top of his head
lime green with peroxide, to the girl whose locks
were dyed the exact color of one of those
vibrant orange-yellow crayons in
the familiar green and yellow
64 Crayola box.
The hair matched her sneakers.
Exactly.
The boy read his paper
into his hands. They poised on his belly
like wounded birds.
When he concluded, the other girl
with blue eye shadow, thick mascara
and the skintight shirt, asks
for more detail. In her commentary she uses
the word “awesome” six times.
She takes her turn to read, and
the other group member, looking suave
in American Eagle cap and matching shirt
says he thinks she might need a comma,
or something, somewhere…
She adjusts her shirt over her bare
midriff and runs her eyes over the paper
again.
The white noise of the air conditioner
swallows up the sounds of their
breathing. All is still until
peroxide boy leans forward.
“If you write from the heart,” he says,
“You can’t go wrong.”
She nods.
“Really,” he continues,
“I could feel it—
all of it.”
Each heart is unique,
filled with people, places, objects and memories that make us the teachers we
are today! Draw your heart. Shape it, shade it, and size it according to
your uniqueness. Think about who and
what has stayed inside your heart and those that have “left” your heart.
Then……..
Map within or outside your
heart those places important to your teaching career.
Map then within or outside
your heart those people special to you – the teacher.
Map then the passions,
objects, issues, causes, memories, subjects of
curiosity, and moments that have remained memorable to you
throughout your teaching career.
Now Write…….
Take 5 minutes and write
everything you can about a person or place or memory, etc., from your map. Write without thinking, revising,
changing. Let your brain connect with
your paper. Do one more 5 minute timed
writings. Continue with the same topic
or change topics. It is up to you.
Now Share……
When the 5 minutes are up,
share one of the pieces you wrote with the person next to you.
Think about how this piece
of writing might become a piece you develop for publication.
Thanks
to Georgia Heard for the Mapping the Heart idea found in her book
Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School.
Thinking
about writing experiences and your own history as a writer:
1. What can you
remember about the first thing you ever wrote?
2. What kinds of
writing have you done for yourself rather than for a school assignment?
3. What is the most
satisfying assignment you can remember?
4. In what ways
have teachers, their writing assignments and their feedback helped you or
hindered you in learning how to write?
5. How has feedback
from friends helped you to learn to write?
6. What other
writers have influenced you in developing a style or technique? How?
7. Under what
conditions do you write best? most
happily? with the most satisfying
results?
8. Under what
conditions do you experience the most frustration when you write?
9. Describe the
process you go through when you write.
10.What do you
think is most important about your writing?
11.How important is
writing in your life?
12.What is writing
for?
13.What do you remember
writing in the past month?
14.What do you
remember writing last semester that you were proud of?
15.What types of
written correspondence do you maintain?
16.What is the most
important letter you ever wrote?
17.What was the
biggest reaction you ever got to a piece of writing?
18.What can you
remember about some of your high school English teachers?
19.What was the
role of writing in your mother’s life?
20.What was the
role of writing in your father’s life?
Teachers—all levels, full and part time,
Pre- or post-service—Publish your writing!
Plymouth Writers Group
11th Annual Anthology of
Teachers’ Writing: Points of Connection
Plymouth Writers Group is compiling
its eleventh annual anthology of teachers’ writing. Our title and
theme for this year’s volume is Points of Connection. We are looking for fiction, essays,
poetry and narrative which speak to those moments in which worlds meet. We are
looking for writings from the contact zones where connections can be made.
. Sometimes contact with another can
bring us into a confrontation with ourselves.
We are looking for those moments when contact becomes connection.
Our focus is on publishing teachers/ creative literary writing. The writing does not need to relate directly to the classroom. We are soliciting writings from teachers about the classroom or other aspects of life. While we are interested in personal narrative essays based on classroom life, we do not publish scholarly work, or editorials related to the teaching profession, as our focus is on the publication of creative literary work.
Please
send two clean copies of your manuscript.
Prose manuscripts should be
500-3,000
words in length and single spaced (approximately 1-6 pages). The name, address, telephone number and
teaching affiliation of the author should be included on a title page, but not
on the manuscripts. Please send no more
than three pieces, no more than two of which may be prose. Send to:
Meg Petersen/Plymouth Writers Group
English Department MSC #40
Deadline: Submissions must be received no later than March 31,
2007 in order to be considered. We will
provide an e-mail acknowledgement of receipt upon request. Please send a SASE
for our decision. No manuscripts will be
returned. Final decisions will be made
on or before June 30, 2007. Authors will
be contacted regarding accepted submissions.
Direct queries to megp@plymouth.edu
Plymouth Writers Group
Visit our web site http://www.plymouth.edu/pwp/pwg/
Writing About When You Were The Age
of Your Students
For this exercise, I want you
to think about yourself when you were about the age your students are now. When
you approach a question, try to make your answer last at least a few
paragraphs. Take the time to think about the question and try to make the most
of your answer.
1.
Give a general description of yourself at that
age; what was life like for you?
2.
What was family life like? How did you feel
you fit into your family? Think of a memory of something that happened in your
family.
3.
Describe your favorite books. What made them
special to you?
4.
Describe a specific school memory.
5.
Write about your best friend and the
experiences you had together. What has happened to that friendship since
childhood?
6.
Describe your nemesis. Who made your life
miserable and what did they do to make it so rough?
7.
What was the biggest trouble you got into?
Describe what you did or didn’t do to deserve what happened to you.
8.
What was your greatest accomplishment? How did
it make you feel? What influence do you think it has had on your life since?
9.
Describe your personality. In what ways has it
changed as you’ve gotten older? In what ways has it stayed the same?
10.
Describe what your parents were like. What was
your relationship like with them?
11.
What other relatives besides your immediate
family do you remember from that time? Describe a scene with your most interesting relative.
12.
Describe something that people would be
surprised to know about you at that age. .
13.
Describe some of the cultural influences such
as music, television, movies, plays, art or writing.
14.
Describe the home you grew up in. If you lived
in several different homes, describe one or discuss the reasons for the
frequent moves. Were you moving up or working your way down?
15.
Describe a family vacation. Where did you go?
Why did you go there? What did you do? How did you travel?
adapted from Hewitt, John The
Read
a lot, live your life, and listen and watch, so that your mind fills up
with millions of images. Shake it. See what floats to the top. Transfer
floating images to page, word by word. Repeat. When it is all done, remove
clunky bits. Sounds simple, yes? And it is, if you stay loose and open, and
if you have the patience to transfer those images, word by word, from your
mind to the paper. ~Sharon Creech