A plentitude of Aha moments

The second week of the NVWP ISI provided me plenty of Aha! moments.  The first moment came with Katie’s free verse exercise.  Although designed for middle school students, I immediately saw the application to my 11^th grade AP Language and Composition class. I expect my students to have some experience with close reading but they often are at a loss when I mention that we are going to perform a close reading of a short non-fiction passage.  I plan to adapt Katie’s lesson to non-fiction to give my students another way of analyzing the rhetoric of a selection, something with which they struggle mightily and rarely succeed.  The critical aspect of Katie’s presentation for me was the fact that she provided a guided investigation of specific elements of the text.  Rather than expecting my students to discover on their own the way the author makes meaning, I can scaffold the idea by helping them look for certain elements to give them the idea.  I have used lessons from the AP Lang textbook but Katie’s lesson was more accessible.  Cool!

Aha 2- Amy W.’s research lesson offered engaging ways of helping my 10^th and 11^th graders understand the research process and argument development.  I especially thought the dueling positions scenario will be effective in class because it allows students to connect the opposing viewpoints with an image.

 

Aha 3-I have not stopped using strong verbs since Janique’s demo.  To my freshman and sophomores, get strong!  Out goes my pre-AP workbook lesson and in with Janique’s. 

Aha 4- John’s magnum opus lesson on description will be the perfect accompaniment to our reading of Lord of the Flies. 

I enjoyed the intense, and for some, emotional two days of self-discovery and writing during the Writing Marathon and the Progoff Journaling presentation. 

Aha’s 5 and 6- One unexpected outcome from my visit to Winchester was the chance to share with teachers from other districts their experience with and approach to teaching writing.  It helped me broaden my and develop of feeling for a broader community of teachers.  The read around highlighted some talented writers and gave me an insight into what my students must feel as they read aloud in class. 

Aha’s 7 and 8- I learned about not only myself but also some excellent methods to use with my students.  When I teach To Kill a Mockingbird, creating a dialogue with Jem, Scout, Atticus or Tom Robinson will be a new assignment for my students.  Regardless of what Pete says, I think journaling provides an abundance of ways to discover topics to explore further in non-fiction and fiction pieces along with the tools to help develop better writers. 

Aha 9-Can we have a presentation on non-fiction publishing? Amber started one-can we have another?

Supreme Aha- My writing group continues to help me discover new elements of my writing and ways to improve my student’s writing groups. Thank you for listening so many times to The Talisman. And thank you for the poetry and stories I have heard from you!  What a great writing group!

Peter's Statement of Inquiry

Intro:
If everything is an emergency, nothing is. Of all the pithy witticisms bestowed upon me by my previous head of school, this one continues to hold significance for me. Especially when I think about teaching, reading, and writing. A snapshot into my brain would reveal two hemispheres alight in near-constant 911 calls and emergency fires: grades, RTI, parent-teacher conferences, constructivist methods of behavior modification, the 20th century, No Child Left Behind/A Race to the Top, writing, reading, PISA scores, NAEP scores, Lawrence Baines, SRI, Lexile levels, privatized reform, Paul Thomas, authentic assessments, using technology, etc. There is certainly nothing extraordinary or exceptional about this. Teachers are constantly juggling multiple (and often competing) demands from various public/personal realms. What follows is a statement of where I am as of this day.

Where I've been:
Anyone who has been within earshot of me at pretty much any point during the last couple of weeks is at least somewhat familiar with where I've been as a teacher. Started out in a data-centric charter school teaching test strategies to a 100% free and reduced lunch population. I taught reading and writing in test-prep formats. I did it a few years and loved it for a few years. I'm not sure 'love' is really the right word. But for reasons best explored elsewhere, the school provided me the structure and discipline I needed at the time.

I changed positions to Arlington County and started on a new path of self-discovery and transformation. My teaching philosophy slid from hardcore behaviorism to constructivism. I did away with grades, alienating myself from my colleagues and some of my students in the process. I felt like I had lost myself. I needed something to grasp onto. Some sort of philosophical or methodological rock that wouldn't disappear at the first sign of a new idea.
I've spent the last 9 months reading education history and pedagogical theory attempting to ground myself in the facts. To elevate my mood by immersing myself in the history of the profession. If only I read enough John Dewey, or learned more about the history of education reform, maybe only then would I know who I was and how I should proceed. Except, frustratingly, it hasn't worked out that way. 

Instead, the more I read, the more I write, the less I seem to know.

Where I am now:
In many ways I feel like I've created a sort of pedagogical Frankenstein. An amalgamation of specific viewpoints and reactionary politics repellant to most teachers I engage with. I don't like grades. I don't like measurement. I don't like testing. I'm coming to realize that I don't possess the skills or understanding to understand, much less convey, the nuanced complexity behind everything. Instead, I seemed to have gravitated only towards the most reactionary of viewpoints. Part of me thinks this is normal. That I have to work my way through these understandings. That I can't rush my personal journey back to myself. So now I'm desperately trying to find my place as an educator. 

Where I want to go:
I want my teaching to mirror my ethics. I want my students to use writing as a tool for understanding themselves, literature, and the world around them. I want to engage my students' families and to help them understand that my class is not a class focused on measurement or numbers or letters. 

How I'll get there:
I'm still working on this part.

Who needs A Fountain of Youth? All you need is the NVWP ISI!

Who needs A Fountain of Youth? All you need is the NVWP ISI!

Enthusiasm, passion, and fun are all words that come to mind when thinking about the first week of the NVWP Summer Institute.  It started out with so many new ideas to explore and people to talk to and it just kept on getting better.  I have not written so much, so quickly in different genres in years.

 I did not know what I would write about during Morning Pages but that blank page is not attractive and, after some tentative scribbling, I quickly filled it up. Writing during Morning Pages made me feel like I was a boy again, just writing for the fun of it. I had forgotten the experience of just writing, of what it was like to write about what I wanted to write and not for someone else, whether they are student, fellow teacher or administrator.  Morning Pages was like a Fountain of Youth, taking me back to the days when I was just a little kid with a big yellow note pad, a pencil and all morning to fill it up. 

Then there were the demonstration lessons. I learned new ways of brainstorming from Maggie and writing descriptions from Janice Jewell. With a nod to Stanley Kubrick and Dr. Strangelove, I learned to stop worrying and love illustration during April Sommers’ presentation.  Gabbie showed me how I could use some of the techniques she employs with her ESOL students with my struggling 11^th graders. Amy’s lesson even helped me understand better the struggles of my wife, who moved frequently during her childhood.  Last but not least, Sarah’s lesson not only gave me plenty of ideas to use as I teach process but the idea for a yearlong study of the effectiveness of teaching strategy and process in improving the writing of  adolescents. 

What a week!  I even started writing something I had wanted to for years.  And, where else do you have a chance to read the first draft of a short story by Mark Farrington?

4 days later...

Wow.
Week one Summer Institute
done and gone.
Such an intense,
compelling experience.
Me.
Demo lesson. Day 2.
First time (for everything)
I have ever presented as a teacher
to other
teachers (people like me)
I hit it out of the park
Now,
How to perfect my swing?

Interacting with others
Full of
Passion
Dedication
to writing,
Learning
Their STUDENTS
A waterfall of
Encouragement////acknowledgement

What I mean by that IS
I don't feel alone anymore.

I have many wonderful colleagues
at my school.
I promise.
But.
Not many of them have the same fire and excitement 
that I do.

Everyone
in that tiny conference room
at George Mason does.

What I Think About When I Think About a Statement of Inquiry

            At my first Summer Institute, we were told to come in the first day having written a first draft of a “position paper” – some thoughts on some position we had related to writing and/or the teaching of writing. At the time I didn’t know if I had a “position” on anything, but I could come up with a few things I wanted to learn to do better. One of them – and the one I chose to write about in my first position paper – focused on peer response groups. I used them in my classes, and I believed (in a theoretical way) in their value, but I’d never quite felt I was doing them very successfully, and so I decided I would devote at least some time during the Summer Institute to learning more about peer response groups and how I might make them work better in my own classes.

            I’m not sure why I came up with this particular idea; we were never told more than that single instruction to write “thoughts on some position.” And when I got together with my writing group that first Monday afternoon and we shared our position papers, the thing that stood out most to me was how differently each of us had interpreted the assignment. I had chosen a fairly specific aspect to focus on, while other teachers had taken a broader approach, presenting their values in regard to teaching writing, or talking about their own experiences and aspirations as writers themselves; one, a Physical Education teacher, phrased her position as a basic question: How can I use writing with my students?

            The title “position paper” has since been replaced by the title “statement of inquiry,” but one of the things that remains is the freedom each teacher has to shape this statement around whatever interests and matters most to that individual teacher. Perhaps it is some specific aspect or technique involved in teaching writing that you’d like to do more, or better. (In a later summer, my statement of inquiry focused on portfolios, which at the time I didn’t know enough about to feel comfortable introducing into my classes, but by the time the summer ended, I was so hooked I’ve never taught a writing class since that didn’t use some version of the portfolio system.) Perhaps it has to do with your sense of yourself as a writer or something you’d like to do that will help you as a writer. Or perhaps it’s a broader issue you want to consider and explore, maybe from a political point of view. At one point, thinking about the summer, I pondered making my “statement of inquiry” simply be: technology (though I realize this is neither a statement nor, I guess, an inquiry.) I feel that I am too far behind the times both in my ability to use technology for myself (I’d like to have a web page, for instance, and although I am on Facebook, I don’t know how to do anything on Facebook, not even how to find all my “new notifications”), and also in using technology in my classes. So even though “technology” isn’t particularly enlightening as the title of a statement of inquiry, I knew what I meant, and if I’d chosen to go in that direction, I would have been comfortable with the choice.

            What I have ended up choosing to explore for my statement of inquiry stirs some excitement in me, and for me at least, that’s important. Simply put, I feel as if I have caught the “political bug.” I am a creative writing teacher; I believe in the value of creative writing. (I probably believe in its value more than I believe in the value of Algebra or Chemistry, but then I do admit to being biased.) I believe students innately sense its value, and the vast majority of teachers understand it has great value too. And yet creative writing, like so many other arts, is constantly being reduced (or eliminated) by those who make the decisions about what teachers will teach and what students will learn.

            In one of our informal staff discussions over the last few weeks, Peter Anderson mentioned that in some ways, teaching creative writing can be seen as a subversive act. This thought shocked me at first, in part because I teach in a creative writing program – I would be considered subversive is I did not focus my classes around creative writing. But the more I thought about it, the truer it began to seem. Even in my program, one of the deans recently said that she believed supervising a creative writing thesis is much easier and less work than supervising a Government thesis, for instance, because a creative writing thesis has no content. I can’t begin to explain all the ways that statement is wrong.

            This summer, I’m going to search out all the errors in that notion. I’ve spent most of my life learning the “hows” of teaching writing; now I want to look into the “whys.” I know, at a level deeper than any conscious argument can tap, that creative writing is important. But I’ve never really thought about how I can make that case to others. This summer, I’m going to try.

                                                                                                                    Mark