After the Gold Rush—Making The Most of Life After Testing

For 9th–12th Grade Teachers

With Maralina Bennett Milazzo

We all wish we could go back to someone we love and say, “tell me about the time…” Let’s give our students the tools to get these stories written and recorded for future generations, and, at the same time, make crucial connections with parents and family members. Using several different methods for recording, follow a journey through the lives of others as your students preserve the stories of their family members and their ancestors. Oral and written biography methods will be explored. Be ready to “plum” a good story of your own to record for your own family!

With Suzanne Murphy

With Anderson’s sharply drawn novel about the 17th–century Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic, Suzanne Murphy demonstrates how to use historical novels to guide several types of student writing. Using this reading, her students practice writing summaries about research topics, produce a replica of historical news, and compose a poem generated from scenes in the novel.

With Victoria Baxter

Participants will have great fun creating inspirational sparks and using them as writing prompts. Three of the creative writing activities we’ll explore in this workshop are:

• Photo Cubes,
• Wordless Books, and
• Story Cards

These prompts will be used to help guide and encourage young students to select their own writing topics as a means of conveying that their thoughts and ideas are valued and to make writing a motivational activity.

With Maria Clinton

We’ve heard of creative writing, where students combine past experiences and imagination to “create” stories and poems. But, there’s not much “creating” going on in English classrooms when it comes to reading. Too often, students are asked to summarize and/or answer basic comprehension recall questions. Why don’t we teach creative reading? In this workshop, Jay will share strategies designed to both improve how students read as well as how they respond to what they read. Learn how to get students to show deeper knowledge through meaningful essays and literary poems. It’s a workshop that will get you thinking about how you teach a book.

With Jay Richards

We’ve heard of creative writing, where students combine past experiences and imagination to “create” stories and poems. But, there’s not much “creating” going on in English classrooms when it comes to reading. Too often, students are asked to summarize and/or answer basic comprehension recall questions. Why don’t we teach creative reading? In this workshop, Jay will share strategies designed to both improve how students read as well as how they respond to what they read. Learn how to get students to show deeper knowledge through meaningful essays and literary poems. It’s a workshop that will get you thinking about how you teach a book.

With Karen Foss and Sara Tolle

We all know that students who read a lot tend to be stronger writers. A natural connection exists between reading and writing, enabling students to adapt skills learned in one area to the other. This workshop examines this natural connection and provides tips for successfully implementing the reading/writing connection in K–3 grade classrooms. Karin and Sara will review integrated instruction ideas and evaluate results from participation in activities that promote the development of both reading and writing skills, particularly for ELLs.

Voice - that ineffable something that allows us to read a piece of someone’s writing and see his or her very soul reflected there. As secondary school English or Language Arts teachers, if we have just read 52 essays one rainy weekend, and we come upon that paper with “voice,” we send up a little shout of thanks to the writing gods and goddesses. Why? We are celebrating that rare student writer whose face immediately floats before ours as we respond with respect and affection, because everything that student is in his or her very being is reflected in the piece, be it poem, essay, memoir, narrative - or yes – even expository essay.

Over the past few months the San Jose Area Writing Project has been sponsoring inquiry group sessions where teachers from the educational spectrum have come together to research and reflect upon the notion of helping students develop “voice” when writing. We have decided that with so many prescriptive and proscriptive forces virtually demanding that teachers “teach to the test,” “follow the standards,” and embrace the No Child Left Behind governmental mandate, the challenge of encouraging students to “write with voice” has become an even greater one. Indeed it has never been easy to teach the concept of voice, and I’ve learned that many teachers cannot even agree on a definition. M.H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms states the concept thus: “We have the sense of a pervasive authorial presence, a determinate intelligence and moral sensibility, which has invented, ordered, rendered, and expressed all these literary characters and materials in just this way.” Oh, my. I prefer to think of it as, “Wow! Here’s another super paper from Trieu! I just knew it was her paper after the first few lines!”

Recently, I was struck by an analogy between the art of writing with “voice” and the art of teaching with voice. Just as a writer cannot be an effective and passionate one if he or she has not been encouraged to develop writing voice, so too, a teacher cannot be an effective and passionate educator if he or she has not been allowed to develop “voice” as a teacher. I think students should be able to overhear other students describing a lesson learned in my classroom and without having heard my name, say eagerly to one another, “That must be one of Ms. Milner’s lessons or classes. That is just SO Ms. Milner!” If we don’t teach with “voice”, we may as well just hook students up to a video or computer and let them “mainline” data

My students know that I value equality, diversity, justice, and progressive thinking and that these values will be reflected in everything I teach them and help them discover for themselves. They know that I will use literature to promote these values, film to illuminate them, and class discussion to analyze them. They can count on me to encourage them to write with voice and passion about these notions, and to share my own writing with them. In keeping with the concept of social justice, I don’t think I can ask a student to do anything I would not be willing to do, and writing with them helps me put my “philosophical” money where my “voice” is, so to speak.

I don’t mean that I should be an ideologue in the classroom, implying that students embrace a particular political philosophy or they will be traveling down the Super “F” highway in my grade book! I just mean that students ought to have a committed “voice” modeled for them in order to empower them to be agents of change in their own worlds and to not feel so powerless in the face of various injustices in the world. Teaching students that the world exists beyond their neighborhoods, and that they can affect that world once they grasp the potential of leading an educated life, is critical to being an educator with voice. A graduated senior, who had nothing to gain from “kissing up to the teacher” told my class that his whole view of women had changed for the better because of a unit I taught using literature that revolved around the oppression of women. He said he never again would look at his sister, mother or female friends in quite the same way. I also had a student write me a letter saying he had never enjoyed English class until he took my American Lit class because his former teachers had never shown anything akin to what the student termed my “passion” for my job and for literature. I’d like to think Scott was responding to my teacher voice when he wrote this.

But sharing a passion for social justice and literature is not all that my voice entails. My students know I will share my own writing process with them in order to empower them to improve their own. They know I will enthusiastically read aloud any piece of literature I have chosen to share with them and that I will love doing so. They can count on me to sing a song if it appears in a novel, and I am familiar with the tune. They know I will use humor every chance I get if it will help them understand a concept, but never if it is at a student’s expense. They know I love to laugh at myself and share my many foibles. They know that I love primatology and incorporate that love into the teaching of grammar, a fundamental, but often rather dry aspect of a language arts curriculum.

My students realize fairly early in the year that if a work of literature moves me, I will freely show my tears and share my profound dismay at the injustices represented in the work and in the world. One day in class, I stopped an honors class cold when I overheard a student using the term ghetto to describe something he thought was stupid. I grabbed the so-called ‘teaching moment” to address how personally offended I am by the use of a term that holds so much emotional impact for people who know its connection to the Jewish Holocaust. The students were rapt in their attention, but not a one looked surprised. This is just part of Milner’s “voice.” My students know I am willing to learn from them and that I have learned far more from my students than I will ever teach them.

They know I set very high standards for them, and I don’t mean the sort handed down by the governmental powers that be. My “voice” is one that says even when I’m not speaking aloud, “How can you become educated enough to protect yourself from social injustice and work to correct those injustices in the world if you don’t take pride in your work? How can our class of mere mortals affect positive change in the world if you won’t come to class each and every day (and on time) in order to avail yourself of the opportunities afforded you by public education? (And it’s not just the students who must come everyday and on time. I’ve missed approximately 12 days of school in 17 years of teaching because I want to model respect for students and self-respect.) How can my voice in the classroom be one for social justice if I allow a student, male or female, to refer to a grown woman as a “girl,” or a person of color by a racist term? How can I allow a student to use the term “fag” in my classroom or the terms gay or ghetto as supposedly derogatory terms for something they find to be unpleasant, ugly or stupid? How can I model an ideal of equity and equality in the world if I treat my students unfairly or with bias? How can my students learn to love themselves if I don’t admit my own inadequacies and learn to face them?” And finally, “How can I expect them to write with honesty, passion and voice if I don’t teach the same way?”

To these ends, my students examine through literature the oppression of contemporary women and other oppressed groups of people around the world and throughout time. I model effective writing for them as we write an entire essay together based on our reading of a moving short story about the degradation of the homeless entitled, “Waiting for her Train.” Not only do the students learn the nuts and bolts of writing an effective analysis of a literature, but, as we go, I am able to shed light on some of their prejudices about homeless people. I also model poems such as “Where I’m From” and Linda Hogan’s “Heritage” with students so that when they create their own poems, they will be validated in their diversity and identity. The power of both personal and literary voice in these student poems is often humbling.

There are probably students who despise my voice in the classroom and wonder when I’m going to let up on all this “injustice, oppression, racism and inequality stuff!” They may think I’m an idiot when I sing in class. I’ve even been known to illustrate a dance or two if dance is mentioned in literature, and I’ve seen a few students looking mightily embarrassed about that. But what’s important is that it doesn’t bother me, and at least they know I’m the “real thing!”

Just as a student will never develop voice if the only way he or she learns to write is by following a formula; just as a student will never develop voice in writing if all testing is inauthentic and focuses on bubbling an answer sheet; just as no student will ever develop voice if he or she is never given anything authentic to write about; so too, the teacher who is compelled to follow a lock-step, standardized, de-politicized curriculum will never achieve a recognizable “voice” in the classroom. Instead, someone could just pick us up and swipe us over one of those grocery store scanners. I don’t think we want “scan-able” teachers and I’m quite sure we don’t want scan-able students either! One of the most satisfying aspects of working on this piece and sharing it with others has been having other teachers tell me, “I’m starting to wonder now, ‘What is my voice in the classroom? Who am I when I’m there?’” My dearest hope is that you will reflect upon that question yourselves.

We’ve all had the experience of having students express shock when they see us at the movies with a tub of popcorn in our hands. They look taken aback and say something like, “What are you doing here?” When this happens we often joke with colleagues that students must think teachers are stored in a closet over the weekend and during the summer months and then wound up like a wind-up toy on Monday morning and set loose on the students. I hope my students never perceive me as a wind-up toy teacher and that my “voice” as a teacher helps them develop not only their voices as human beings, but “voice” in their writing. I love it when I see some “singing and dancing” in their written work. I’m sure we would all like to see a lot more of it!

By Laurie Halse Anderson

(adapted from a presentation at the 2005 ALAN Workshop in Pittsburgh, PA)

A couple of months ago, I went home again. I moved back to northern New York State. To understand the significance of this, you need to know that I fled the region at age 18 at full gallop. I vowed never, ever, ever, ever to return again.

And then God chuckled.

After a lifetime away, I moved home to marry my childhood sweetheart, a carpenter, and join him in the house he built on a hill covered with maple trees. Our home has too many books to count, a collection of oil lamps, and two fireplaces. This is a good thing because we average twenty feet of snow each winter. We often lose our electricity.

I love it when the power goes out. Scot lights the fires and I light the lamps. We sit close and watch the flames flicker. We talk, read—I write. If a bottle of wine is opened, we often end up singing. Thank goodness the neighbors live far away.

I don’t like it quite as much if the power goes out when I’m alone. Coyotes run along the bottom of our hill yipping and calling. My German shepherd paces in front of the dark windows. The wind blows and the house creaks. I see ghosts in every corner and anxiously wait for the sound of the familiar truck engine that means my beloved is coming home.

The best thing to do when you are alone, in a storm, in the dark, is to watch the fire. Let the light dance for you, soothe you, warm you. The dark is a deep and scary place. It can seem without end or shape. That’s why you have to concentrate on the light—the firelight, the lamp’s flicker, the eyes of a loved one…
…or a book.
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When an author moves to a new home, there is a shift in the Earth’s tectonic plates. The accumulated weight of all the books is staggering. Before I moved, I weeded my collection down to the bare minimum and made truckloads of donations to libraries and friends. Still, my stepson developed an impressive set of muscles hauling all those boxes up to my third floor office.

What didn’t get weeded out were the letters. Like the other authors here [at the ALAN Workshop], I get hundreds and hundreds of letters: assigned, unassigned, blog responses, and emails.

People are surprised to hear about unassigned mail that pours in. Why would kids take the time to write to me if they don’t have to do it for a grade?

If the letter comes from a sexual assault survivor, an outcast, or a depressed kid, usually she read Speak. If it’s a driven academic star who is burning out and frantically trying to hide it, she read Catalyst. If the writer is a teen who is not sure what the point of school is and what to do after graduation, he stumbled across Prom.

(One of my daughters has promised to create an online quiz: “Which Laurie Halse Anderson book are you?”)

When the letters started coming in I was confused, too. Why were they writing to me? Why would any teenager write to an author?

It’s quite simple. In story there is magic, words wound in a spell that mysteriously connects one heart to the next. Katherine Paterson says that literature “has a healing quality, a quality that enlarges our human spirits.” She also says that “a great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.”

There is magic on the page—words strung in sequence to create worlds that have loves and losses and bad jokes and truth and characters who feel alive. That magic works in the soul of a reader and helps focus him, helps him see the world a little clearer. The reader feels as close to the author as he does to his best friend, to the person who knows the secrets of his heart and still likes him.

I’ve gotten letters from every state, from England, from Germany, from Italy, and Slovenia. From jail cells. From houses that feel like jails. Many of these letter writers insist that they hate reading, that they hate books, and that my book was the first one they’ve finished since (fill in the blank) fourth, fifth, sixth grade.

These letter writers usually mention their teachers. Did you know that? They tell me about you, the teacher who assigns books that have meaning to students, who hands to kids books that are not part of the curriculum, who use their own money to replace the books that are stolen over and over again from their classroom collection. I get letters from kids who pretend they’re not listening.

Your best students, your most troubled students, and all the kids in-between are connecting to the literature that you are working so hard to share with them. You are passing along the light of our collective experience, our wisdom and magic. It’s working.

If you are here today, you are a great teacher or you will be a great teacher. Not because you’re smart, though you are. Not because you keep up-to-date with the latest research, though you do.

It’s because you give a damn. You are not content to phone it in. You don’t hide in the faculty lounge or your car during break. You give your all, you give every ounce of patience, honesty, hard work and discipline to your students. You leave each night as exhausted as professional athletes because you leave it all on the field. Pro athletes only play 20, 30, 60 games a year. You play 185.

Authors are granted the ability to transfigure words into story—into poetry, novels—epics, even. (Fantasy authors always write the epics. Why is that?) But the ability to twist characters together with plot is worth absolutely nothing without a reader.

The author tends the tree that grows into story and provides the fuel. Anyone who has tried to camp on a rainy day knows that it is not much fun sitting around watching a pile of wet logs turn moldy. You need the spark, the persistent flame that will catch the wood and bring it to life in all of its heat and glory and light—illuminating the faces of the cold, wet campers, illuminating the lives of the millions of teenagers who are desperate for that glow.
*********
It is very easy to get caught up in the changes of our society, in the stupid “evils” that silly people like to attribute to teenagers. They are allegedly oversexed, undereducated, immoral, drug and technology-addicted, disrespectful, tattooed, pierced, branded, illiterate, overweight, anorexic, celebrity-addled, half-naked, spoiled, undisciplined little brats.

You and I both know that is ridiculous. Today’s teens exhibit fine, righteous qualities. They are smart and funny. They form friendships across lines of gender, race, class, and ethnic background. They enjoy community service. They are artistic, adventurous, and optimistic. They are stepping up to the plate and preparing to make this world a better place.

Gifted, dedicated teachers like you have an awful lot to do with that. You fight for education in the face of ignorance, you battle for literacy and justice and morality and peace.

Robert Cormier said, “My heroes are the ordinary people who do their duty quietly, without fanfare, whether it’s fighting a war or going to work every day. I feel that we are surrounded by heroes and saints in our daily lives.”

He’s right. We are surrounded by heroes and saints in our daily lives. We are surrounded by teachers who burn in the darkness, who offer comfort to the cold and weary, who brighten hearts and minds with enlightenment and illumination.

I’m headed north in a little while. Headed back home, where we’ve already seen snow a couple of times. We’re renting a splitter this weekend because we have a mountain of logs in front of the garage that need to be split and stacked. Our son who built his muscles hauling books this summer will be hauling firewood on Saturday (Please do not tell him this.)

The next time you see a fire in a fireplace, or you light a candle, think of me holed up on a stormy night, scratching by the light of an oil lamp. Think of all of us authors scribbling, typing, crossing out, revising, muttering, revising again. Think of the editors who counsel us, prod us, do their own muttering, some cursing, and shepherding. But mostly, think of your own role in the storytelling process.

You are the light. You are their light. A world of grateful readers thanks you for teaching them.

So do I.