Learning How To Teach, Year 25

I've spent the last week reveling in the magic of reading and writing. Not the teaching part, but the crafts themselves. 

Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle speak of the "volume problem" in high school English. Kids, they say, aren't reading and writing enough to build stamina with challenging texts and to write focused, supported pieces. As I look at my list of books read this summer (fourteen!), as well as the hours I've labored over blog posts, I realize I've spent a lot of previous summers, as well as school months, not actively engaged in the practices where I'm the so-called 'expert'. We speak a lot about motivating and engaging kids. Modeling my love of reading by enthusing over To Kill A Mockingbird year in and year out for twenty-five years probably isn't enough to sustain buy-in for my students over the long haul. Reading for pleasure as a literature teacher isn't a luxury; it's necessary if I'm going to pull from rich examples and book talk relevant texts every day. 

In selecting books for my classroom library, I turned to Goodreads, where my account's been pretty dormant for years. What a goldmine! Authentic readers effusing the 'academic discourse' of literature discussion, genuine models for talking and writing about books. It's also cool to peek into the windows of my friends' diverse reading lives. I've suggested Goodreads to my students many times as a way to find books or 'next' books, but jumping into the sandbox myself has me stepping up my game and planning to incorporate it into my classes regularly this year. The suggested book lists will help students locate 'next books', and I can show kids that real people, all kinds of real people and not just English teachers, discuss and critique books every day. And--lo and behold!--no one is doing so via a five-paragraph essay.

Gallagher laments the focus on task-oriented vs. generative writing at the high school level. I am sooo guilty of forsaking the latter. I've let standards, test prep, MAP, ASPIRE, ACT, etc. dictate what I've allowed kids to create. How often when a student has raised a hand to ask, "When will we do creative writing?" has my mind filled with C-E-A paragraphs and A-C-T introductions, followed by a shrug, wince, and a lame remark about being creative with word choice and sentence structure? Too many times. What bunk. No more.

Writing is hard. I've generated more writing this summer than I have in decades. Keeping my "butt in the chair," as Anne Lamott would say, lends validity to expecting my kids to do it. And more than giving me the credibility to ask them write, it means compassion and empathy will drive my feedback. (Did I really give Caleb a C on one of his first writing assignments four years ago because the rubric focused on sentence structure and conventions--even though his voice dominated the piece? Ay-yai-yai!!!) 

The summer of 2017 has transformed pretty much all aspects of my life. One of my chief areas of growth, prep and planning, started with a daily organizer where I'm mapping out and reviewing what I've got going on for the day/week/month etc. each morning. An amazing Target purchase, my daily planner includes a quote for each day. Today's is from Seneca: "As long is you live, keep learning how to live." As I enter my 11th year at South, my 19th in Waukesha, and my 25th as an educator, I'm rephrasing Seneca's words to fit my mindset for this year: "As long as you teach, keep learning how to teach."