Author: Stacy

When you look back on your high school year was senior year English a real highlight for you?  Probably not.  I remember vocabulary workbooks, weekly themes, reading a whole-class novel (or not reading it) and talking it to death during class.  I am certain that there was not much happening that connected to “real life”.  Thankfully for some of next years seniors that will not be the scenario….

I just read a new curriculum for 12th grade english, written by a highschool english teacher in my school district and it is so exciting I want to go back to highschool and take the course!  The title is Literature and Media Literacy and the class will examine just that; how literature, current issues and the media interact to effect society.  Mentor text will be used and the teacher will model her own thinking about an issue.  Reading, research and writing will be constant as students examine literature and various types of media pertaining to an issue of interest to them. 

Imagine, giving high school seniors the respect and responsibility to develop their own research questions, there own purpose for reading….I think there are a lot of lucky seniors out there who will have much better memories of their English class.

I spent this past week with my family at my parent’s beach house.  It was time filled with the expected beach activities; boogie-boarding, paddle ball, ice cream cones, and all of the rest.  We also did something a little bit different, something that I told my kids not every kid is lucky enough to do on their summer vacations, we wrote in our notebooks!  You know by now that my 11 year old eats this up, she would write for hours each night, so time to sit and have everyone write is her beach dream.  The seven and three year old go along because this is just what their zany mom does, my eight year old nephew took some convincing.  He is a very typical, active, fast moving, eight year old boy who feels that summer means “No School Stuff”.  Now didn’t he know he was with Aunt Stacy?

I had so many generating ideas from my few days with Mark Overmeyer I couildn’t wait to try them out, and what better place to gather your ideas than at the beach.  I told the more resistant members of the family that they were going to help me with some school “experiments” (eight year old boys love the word experiment, they think something may blow up!).  We started the first night with drawing a map of one place you had been that day.  Everyone got into this, comparing their maps and what they remembered about the same places.  From there we pied one item or place on the map and talked about what we remembered about it, the talk then became what you write about. 

 It was great!  The kids were talking, sharing ideas, getting excited to write their memories from the day.  I set the timer to write for 5 minutes, long enough to get some ideas down but not so long that a certain eight year old would be able to yell “I’m done” !  The pens, pencils, and crayons were moving like crazy, when the timer went off I even heard “wait, I need another minute”.  Everyone wanted to share what they wrote, what a special thing to watch, kids sharing their beach memories from that day, with huge smiles. 

Shouldn’t that be what every writing workshop in school is like?  Talking, sharing, writing, more talking, more writing, more sharing, all done with the smiles and enthusiasm of kids at the beach in the summer.  The past week of “writing experiments” is what I am going to keep in mind next year when I help teachers set up their writing workshop.  I want all kids to feel like writing can be “a day at the beach” (I know it is corny but I couldn’t help it)

Slept in, check.  Went to the beach, check.  Read a mindless book, check.  The first week of summer to do list is done, now that I have recharged it is time to look back on the last, frantic weeks of school…

Celebration, that is the word that comes to mind when I think about the end of the school year.  The celebrating that went on in our school was different this year, it wasn’t about “yeah, we made it”, it was about “Look at what we did!!”.   What they did was some amazing writing and those of us who were lucky enough to celebrate along with these writers will forever be touched by their words.

It started with Twenty:5, an unforgettable evening of magical words, but it didn’t end there.  The last two weeks of school my appointment calendar was filled with celebration invitations.  The celebration format varied from “open house” type classroom galleries to formal readings of personal anecdotes to a coffee house of poets, but each one was the same in that it truly celebrated the satudents and their words.  The pride that was pulsing through our school was unmistakable, it could be felt the minute you walked down a hall.

How did this happen?  What took us from one gallery to a school full of writing celebrations?  Some say it came from reading Writing Gems, a book that can change how a teacher looks at writing.  Maybe, but I think it came from amazing teachers.  Teachers who let their guard down, who let their students lead the way and teach them about how to teach writing, teachers who were willing to take the risk that they were asking their students to take.  No matter how it happened, the results will forever change the students who sit in one of these classrooms and that is all that matters.