Stuff My Students Say, and Stuff I Say to Them

No extended commentary below, but I've been meaning to archive these things somewhere:

1. Student: "Why do you guys always say this: 'remember, characters don't know they're in a book'? You always say it so that we won't say stuff like 'On page 54...', but that way of explaining it doesn't make sense. What makes more sense is for you to say: 'the reader of the essay won't connect with the page number--it means nothing without the context.'" Brilliant. I'm going to use that explanation from now on.
2. Regular readers of this blog will know that I constantly question what we're doing in English classes, and specifically how analytical writing relates to both the texts we're reading and what our students need. In conversation with Gracie during class one day, I came up with this: "All literary analysis boils down to why you should read this book." Not like a book review, but rather, what the text tells you about the world, yourself, language, and so on. I'm still not sure that's the right answer to the question "What's the point of writing these essays?" But it's one of them.
3. Another answer: You're lifting weights. I don't expect many of my students to become academics. But while our culture is indeed becoming increasingly visual, it's also becoming even more based in the written word. For every wordless photoessay, there are many more written responses. Writing analytical essays is to the actual writing you do in life as lifting weights is to playing a sport well. It's not the thing itself, but a way of strengthening your muscles for the thing itself.

The Big Picture

Recently, I met with a consultant the school is bringing in to help us with our inquiry work. She pushed a few of my ideas further, and helped me clarify some of the ways I'm going to go about working on this project. But she also suggested that I ask some bigger-picture questions about the curriculum we teach and why we teach what we teach. One of the questions we came up with was: how does the stuff we teach actually lead to critical thinking?

The question came up as I described to her my struggles with teaching literary analysis in a way that lets students' hearts be in their work. It's not easy. So she asked me why we have to teach it at all. I came up with the usual reasons: writing such essays is required in college, and becoming skilled at literary analysis will benefit our students by making them better critical thinkers—if they can dissect a text, then they can dissect anything else. But as I teach freshmen the rudiments of such analysis this fall, I am reminded of just how difficult a genre it is, and just how arbitrary some of the rules may seem. Is asking students to fit into this mold also somehow depriving them of developing their own critical voices? Or are there ways to get them into this mode that allow for more freedom?

In Advanced Comp, I've been experimenting with allowing students to choose their texts for the analytical writing portion of the class. In part, my decision to do so is grounded in the idea that choice is incredibly important to writers. In the real world, scholars choose both their field of study and their concentrations, even though they do have to sometimes take courses (and write papers) that are out of their particular concentration. So why wouldn't high school students benefit from an element of choice in what they study? This year's experiment has gone well: I have four groups reading four books, and they're working with each other to understand the texts and write about them. That doesn't mean that they love expository writing—they're all excited to move on to writing personal narrative next week. But giving them choice does mean that they've made an investment that they have in the texts that they might not otherwise have. As one student put it to me when I asked them how choosing books was different, "Even if I hate the book, I'd still be like, this is cool because I chose it."

But those are seniors; they've spent the last four years working their analytical muscles, and while they don't all feel that they're strong writers, they do know what the expectations are for their writing. What can I do with freshmen to engage them more in the process of writing out their thoughts?

Several things come to mind, many of which I use regularly in my classes: informal writing serves often as a bridge between thinking and talking in class and writing formal papers; open time for journaling gives my students time to use writing for something other than analysis; sometimes I say during a particularly good discussion that the way we're breaking down the text is exactly what students are supposed to do in their essays. But few of these tactics lead to my students' feeling anything more than frustrated with the process of learning to write this way—there isn't always the joy of discovery as students first begin learning to write analytically. Older students do get this joy: once they're not struggling all the time with form, the ideas/content can become engaging in and of itself. At that point, they're thinking critically, and happy to do so.

Back to teaching freshmen critical thinking: I need to collect information about my primary question. (How do I make writing something that all students feel they are both able to do and able to improve upon?) I need to find a way to pursue this question that allows me to see tangible results. And I needed to start collecting that data three weeks ago (funny how work gets in the way of work sometimes...). Here's what I'm going to do in the next week: make a quick check-in survey for my frosh, see what they say, and try to tweak some practices in the final stretch of the class. I'll work with a couple of students in particular to see if I can help them stretch those analytical muscles a bit more. And I'll report back, sooner than a month from now.

Blogging Inquiry: Further Refinements to the Question

The last time that I wrote about the inquiry process, I decided that I'd come to a good point in my question-asking. I thought that I wanted to focus on balancing play with analytical writing:

How do I balance teaching (analytical) writing skills with the habit of playing with the text?

Now that we're a few weeks further into the school year, I find myself looking at that question and wondering what on earth I meant. I mean, I know what I meant: I want to make analytical writing accessible, and I want to help my students learn to cultivate a playful attitude toward analysis. I don't want reading and talking about the text to become a chore, something miserable, something that sucks the life out of books. But, given the students I have, is avoiding joylessness really the right focus? Or does the question need a bit more refinement?

I have a few weak writers this term. It's hardly surprising: I certainly don't expect perfection (not at any stage, really), but least of all do I expect perfection from freshmen. Even so, some students struggle considerably with putting their ideas together in a way that is coherent and thoughtful. So, the question really is: how do I reach those students? How do I coach them into improving their weaknesses as writers, without making them think I'm judging them as people? How do I make writing something that all students feel they are both able to do and able to improve at? I have some thoughts, but I guess that's what this term is about—finding out ways to shift my practice that will help these students.

Of course, making changes is all well and good, but I also need to spend some time proving that those changes have worked. How will I know that a shift in my practice has made a tangible difference to this group of learners? Can I just ask a student to report back to me about what works for him, or is this supposed to be more subtle? Am I supposed to sneakily notice what's different, even as I make deliberate changes and efforts with one particular student? The standard ways of assessing student achievement in English classes include essays and participation in class discussion. There are some informal assessments, too. But how will I know that one student has made more progress in his/her writing than another student who initially struggled equally in the class? What happens if I decide to broaden some of my changes to the whole class? How will I know then? Sometimes the best teaching I do feels accidental, some sort of alchemical procedure that just happens to work. Sometimes I know why it worked. I do spend a lot of time planning. But sometimes I'm not sure. Maybe that's a challenge to me as a teacher: I need to begin to be better at identifying not just what works, but why it works.

Refining Inquiry Questions

I'm thinking more about the question I'm going to work on this term as part of the inquiry project. Here are the two questions I started with last week:

1.How can I design assessments that are enjoyable for students and help me see where they’re meeting/not meeting standards?

2. How can I grade papers in a way that students can clearly understand what they need to do to improve? And how can that grading be done most efficiently?

I'm holding off on the third question I posted last week, mostly because so far this year, I haven't been encountering the same resistance. I'm sure it will be something I look into eventually.

I'm thinking that I'll combine questions 1 and 2 into a third, slightly different question: How do I balance teaching (analytical) writing skills with the habit of playing with the text? I'm focusing on freshmen, since I have two sections of them this term. The question is particularly important for freshmen, since they do need explicit writing instruction. Yet part of doing English is also learning how to enjoy the text, not just explicate it.

Part of the inquiry process is also identifying what kind of equity issue my question addresses. English classes tend to privilege the verbal, the folks who like to talk and write. They aren't such friendly places for people who like to think quietly or who want to go out and play soccer. So, how do I assess and reach those people? How do I get them to write compelling analytical essays, even if they'd rather be outside running around? It is an equity issue insofar as there are privileged groups and less-privileged groups in my class. I'd like to make the playing field more even.

I'm still working out how this question will manifest itself in my classroom. Will I try to design different prompts? Will I work with a couple of students who are really struggling, and try to offer them other ways to dig into the texts? And how do I sell analytical writing as fun? Stay tuned...

Examining Writing, pt. 2

I left off here.

Assume, for the moment, that we're not going to stop teaching classes that focus on a region, a type of literature, or a theme. How do we revolutionize our teaching of writing without completely reinventing the wheel?

What are some practices that might help students become better writers and better thinkers? How can we get good essays without having to grade every draft and revision? How can we get students to see their own work critically?

Practices I've used with some success include regular journaling and freewriting a là Bard College. But that has usually been in the context of my Advanced Composition class, which I use as a laboratory for teaching writing; in the context of most other classes, so much time devoted to writing and sharing our writing would be impossible, since we'd also have to look at the text we're reading. I've also spent time using student work to discuss various aspects of analytical essay—the formal stuff like opening and closing paragraphs, integrating textual support, and making clean transitions between ideas. And I'm a huge fan of getting students to write about the text to each other in informal spaces.

But is it possible to assign papers that are less formal, yet that still approach the text and manipulate it in some way? In other words, if it's a given that students must learn how to write something resembling an analytical essay (and that's a big "if"), is it possible to go about it sneakily, by having them write something else, something they enjoy writing more? (Of course, there's another question that arises here: is school supposed to be about enjoyment?)

Should the writing reflect the reading? Or should it intersect with the world in a broader sense? I'm thinking right now of an essay I read in Urban's literary magazine, which is clearly influenced by a piece of literature, but isn't an analytical essay in the way that we teach it. But it is a great essay, and a fine piece of writing.

I know this post is long on questions and short on answers. But the reason I'm blogging isn't necessarily about stating all my beliefs and coming up with a list of the best possible practices for teaching English. I'm blogging to figure out what I think the big questions are and to reflect on what works and what doesn't work, and what I still need to figure out for myself as I continue teaching.

Examining Writing

So, Friday I had a good class. A really good class. One of those classes after which I remember why I'm a teacher, the kind of class that makes me thank my students for their awesomeness. On Friday, I spent 70 minutes talking about Plato's Apology with 13 sophomores. I had a student (a senior, who is "TAing" with me this term) come up with a few questions. He led the discussion, while I sat in as a participant, instead of the person at the front of the room. I mostly listened. A student who doesn't often speak up or get engaged in the conversation came up to me and said, "This is what English class is supposed to be. It's supposed to be talking about the books and relating them to our lives."

Indeed. "The unexamined life is not worth living," after all, and an English class is a good place for such examinations. The mirror, the prism of the text gives us a new way of seeing. A friend of mine likes to joke that English classes are really just group therapy. On Friday, that class did some deep examining, and engaged in some deep therapy. What I love about teaching is the moments like Friday's class—my students read and engage fully with a text that I love, a text that many have loved, and that text, even for just one moment, changes their lives. The thrill for me is being present at that moment of change.

But there's a catch: those moments are fleeting, even with the best combination of students and in the best of classes. The day-to-day work of teaching often beats back those bright moments into the shadows. The reading: not a problem. I like books. The planning: time-consuming, but I'm a planning kind of girl. When I'm not plotting and scheming about what and how to teach, I'm plotting and scheming about my garden, or my house, or what to cook all week. Even the faculty and committee meetings, when they're productive, aren't so bad.

No, I'm talking about the grading. Here's the question that drives most of my questioning and thinking about teaching as a career (examining, if you will): How can I make this job sustainable? How can I have time to live a fulfilled, examined life while still getting papers back to students in the amount of time that my department says is reasonable? There's no easy answer to these questions. In this post, I tried to get at some possible options for making the grading better while at the same time providing the kind of feedback that my students want and need. I've also been reading a bit about one possible way to make my giving of comments more efficient. Instead of dwelling on grading techniques right now, I'd like to spend more time looking at the very nature of the assignments we give.

I'm hardly the first person to say that the way we teach writing needs to be rethought. In fact, high school English as a discipline is a hodgepodge: we teach writing, we teach grammar, we teach critical thinking, we practice multicultural exploration through texts, and so much more. And we're therapists. But what's the purpose of all the stuff we teach? For me, it can't just be about getting my students into good colleges so that they can live productive, possibly happy (but perhaps unexamined) lives. It has to be bigger than that. Even explaining comma splices must be in service of a greater meaning and purpose. Allow me to quote myself:

I want them to show themselves to be insightful readers and speakers, and writers who write authentically, from the heart.

How do we get there from comments like this?

i personally think that it is useless to talk about grammar. when we are taking about themes/ideas that have to do with us, or things that we can choose to do/learn about that is when it becomes interesting for me.
(student response to my "How Do You Know? survey)

I'll posit some thoughts in my next post. Right now, it's time to examine my garden.

How do you know?

It's the last six weeks of school. The runaway train is slowing down, and I'm slowing down even faster. I'm ready to step back from the hectic pace of the year and begin spending more time reflecting and planning, less time grading and prepping. But first I have to get through these six weeks.

All is not lost, however: I have a blog. And here, I can think about all of those things which I cannot yet indulge in too fully. I hope this is the beginning of my re-emergence as a blogger, and as a writer.

Here's what's on my mind today: As a part of the professional development required in my second year as a teacher at Urban, I've been asked to ask my students how they know how they're doing in my class. The answer to this question at almost any other school would be simple: this is your grade. But at Urban it's more complex. We can't just show a grade; in fact, we almost never tell students what their grades are (sorry about the PDF!). We write long narratives, with equally long rubrics. But no grades.

What does that mean for a subject like English, then? In practice, it often means that students are unsure of how they're doing. Even with detailed narratives, one-on-one meetings, and my frequent availability, they still feel like they don't have a sense of where their strengths and weaknesses are. The lack of clarity is more frustrating for freshmen and sophomores, who are still learning to see themselves. I find that my juniors and seniors seem to have a fairly strong idea of themselves as English students, especially themselves as writers. By that point in their Urban careers, they've written enough self-evaluations to begin to see themselves more clearly and honestly.

But I don't just teach juniors and seniors. I spend just as much time with freshmen and sophomores. What I found from an informal survey I took of students is that they do have a sense of what it means to succeed in English: they say that English is about analytical self-expression, in class discussion and in writing. And that's generally true. They say that they see how they're doing by reading comments on their papers, by the way I react to their comments in class, and by seeing how their peers react to what they say. They wish I could write even more on their papers and that they could see a timeline of progress toward the elusive goal of English perfection. I want that goal to seem less elusive.

I'm not going to write more on their papers; I write too much as is. So much of the challenge of teaching, and teaching well, is achieving balance between work and life. Yes, teaching is an all-consuming profession. But I don't want to be consumed by it. Pursuing a full life gives me more space in my teaching, gives me more reserves to draw on, and gives me more air to breathe.

But I wonder about how to get my students to chart their own progress, so they can better see their growth over time. Some initial thoughts:

• Students create their own set of goals at the beginning of the term (I already have them do this, but less formally). As they achieve each goal, they can check it off and add a new goal.
• I could read papers and make marginal notes and fill out a rubric for them (already a standard practice: students self-evaluate on the rubric first). But instead of an end note, I could take 5 minutes to talk with each student about the goals of the paper, what it has done well, and what needs work. Then students write in their own words what they are proud of and what they'd like to work on. The obvious constraint here is time. And this idea doesn't get at getting students to see/evaluate their participation in class.
  

Obviously, neither of the above ideas is perfect. But what they all have in common is a focus on getting the students to see themselves as essential parts of their own learning process. That's the goal. I want them to think of English as something they can do: I want them to show themselves to be insightful readers and speakers, and writers who write authentically, from the heart. They are all capable of achieving this ideal, but I don't think they all see the way to get there.

Not Out of the Cave Yet

I have made it through the beginning of the school year! I have a course description prepared for my spring elective, I have great students this year, and I don't feel like the new kid on the block any more. I do feel like the kid who has too much to say about everything and who hasn't yet learned to keep her mouth shut. I see so many things we could be doing differently, from the way our schedule works to the way we assign papers. I wonder if we are not revolutionary enough. I wonder if we will ever be. I don't like being a revolutionary, but this phase of my life seems to be a revolutionary phase. Perhaps such thoughts are mere shadows on the cave wall. There is more to consider than revolution. I wonder what happened to me?

How did I go from being the girl who wanted to study only the classics, the great books, to being the woman who wants to see a more global approach to education? The desire to look for something new in the stream of discourse seems to me to be a privilege I have gained by dint of my education. That is not to say I wouldn't do it all over again. There is something about having spent four years learning for the sake of learning that is very precious to me. I want all of my smart, curious students to do the same. Even so, I wonder if the way to make classic texts available and interesting to the kids might be to integrate them purposefully and deliberately with a study of more contemporary texts, texts that are equally worthy of attention and study.

I wonder. But then I think that my passion for, e.g, the ancient Greeks shows when I teach the Odyssey to my freshmen and when I teach Sophocles to my sophomores. I prefer Socratic seminars to teacher-heavy lectures. Is that enough? (I doubt it, somehow. I know I can be a better teacher.) I wonder whether my students know that knowledge for its own sake is worthy of pursuit. (That's not entirely true; many of the students at my school have fascinating interests and know a great deal about plenty of things that I would never think of learning about.) I had a student inform me today that he could see why he might, as a future computer programmer or engineer, have a need for math, or science, or English. But he saw no need for history! I asked him whether he was planning to live his entire life without talking about the rest of the world or about politics in this country -- how could he expect to be an informed citizen without some knowledge of history?

I should not have been shocked, perhaps -- these are some very bright, very driven kids -- but I was never one of those kids. I was the kid who thought that in order to understand the world, I had to look at the origins of whatever world I lived in. For me, that meant the Greeks and Romans and Kant and Nietzsche and the rest of the canon. Now, I wonder how much of that canon my students will ever read; worse, I am guilty of the crime of wanting to read as much non-canonical literature as I possibly can. So I come back again to the idea of a privileged position. Time to change the topic:

Today was the day that I asked my students to think of essay-writing not as a chore, but as a way of expressing their thoughts. I asked them to describe aspects of writing that they enjoyed. After much thought and much sarcasm, they seemed to agree that the sense of satisfaction that arises from completing a thought or figuring out what they really mean to say was the most pleasant thing about writing. I spoke to them of my own struggles to write: I am a sporadic writer at best. The muse doesn't sing in me often. I am making a commitment to spend a few minutes every week reflecting on teaching, or life, or whatever on this here blog. The test will be over the next few weeks, the busiest of the school year. I am looking forward to being a part of the conversation, instead of solely taking in others' words, even if for a long time I am talking only to myself.