Creating space for student choice.  In my PBL charter school, and in my own teaching philosophy, this is a driving concept.  If we want our students to be curious, to dig deeply into their learning, to produce excellent work, than they must feel that they are engaged in something meaningful.  They need to be passionate about it.  In my own life, I am fiercely protective of my time.  As a mother and teacher, with other passions and a household to run besides, I feel the need to squeeze every last drop out of the day.  When I’m met with a task or situation that feels inefficient or smacks of busy work, my response is disgusted anger, and the resulting product is sub-par.  I imagine most of us, including our students, feel this way.  Time is precious, and time spent doing work that has no meaningful application is time wasted.

In the self-contained classroom, writing time seems the most sacred of all.  It demands a good chunk.  Generating ideas, organizing, drafting, revising, sharing, refining- not to mention teacher time in reading, commenting, assessing.  Even when woven throughout subjects and curriculum there is never enough time.  And so, I want my students to be fully invested when the clock starts.   In writing, I’m looking to give my students opportunity to explore genres and find their voice.  At the same time, I’m beholden to standardized testing and recognize my responsibility in getting my students prepared for it.

To this end, I’m pulling much of my curricular ideas in writing from Kelly Gallagher’s Write Like This.

First and foremost, he advocates for teachers to write with and model their own writing for their students.  It is imperative that they literally see the writing process in action.  As we move through the writing process- from generating ideas, to graphic organizers, to drafting, revising and editing, students will see me grappling alongside them.  Not only does this provide them with examples and the understanding of how writing happens in real time, it provides me the opportunity to write myself!  Valuable stuff indeed.  Additionally, my goal is to allow students to approach a subject from a variety of real purposes.  Take baseball for example:  one might write a personal or fictional narrative of a situation involving baseball, or maybe one is more interested in researching and explaining the evolution of the game, or perhaps instead one prefers to write and defend their opinion as to why one team is the best.  This allows students to recognize that there are multiple genres with which to approach a topic, as well as giving them the opportunity to write about what is most engaging for them.  If I was asked to write a story about baseball, it would be a poor story as I have absolutely no experience in the game.  However, I’m interested in history and I like to research, so that avenue would provide a richer experience for me.

Ultimately, my job as a writing teacher is to help students find and develop their voice as they explore topics that they care to write about.  In this way, hopefully, my students of writing become adults who can recognize and articulate multiple perspectives in a given situation.  Ours is a multi-layered world with many viewpoints.  We need our young people to be able to research and inform articulate opinions, and develop personal narratives they are proud to share.  I mean for my time in their lives to be a step in that direction.

She was a rough kid.  Long, stringy blond hair, too much makeup and too much exposed body hanging out of pretty much everywhere.   She was one of a whole lot of rough kids in my first class at my new school: 19 boys and 4 girls in seventh grade.  There were, are, bigger personalities and better stories- but she can’t author her own anymore so this one is for B.

Of the four girls in her grade, her role was the hardest by far.  There was the smart one, the pretty one, the well-cared-for quiet one, and then there was B.  All she had going for her was tough talk and an I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude.  Those kids, kids like B, it amazes me that they get up and come to school every day.  She walked; she could easily have gone somewhere else or blown the whole thing off, I doubt her mom would ever have cared.

The one and only time I met the mom was when I was called in for a conference with her and my principal- the purpose to address my poor treatment of her.  The mother, not B. She said I had given her a “dirty look” during Back to School Night because, “I think you’re just jealous of my big boobs.”  I’m not kidding.  That was the conference. Welcome to teaching.

B had warned me prior to the meeting- said “My mom thinks you look down on her.  I told her you’re not like that, you’re cool.”  High praise from this child.  And early on too. The only other things that I really remember about her were when she was caught during tech time in a chat room with a random guy, and when she gave me a hug the next year when I saw her downtown one night..

Several years later she was shot and killed by the police after trying to run them over during a traffic-stop gone bad.  She was probably 18.

Colleagues sometimes chide me for my investment in kids like B.  And they bring her up as an example of how my time and energy there won’t change anything.  “Put that energy into kids who are going to make a difference in the world.  Don’t let the leeches suck you dry.”  And it can be easy to go there.  High stakes testing, crowded classrooms, limited resources, aging energy, straight-up societal values push hard towards abandoning the bottomless pit of generational poverty and dysfunctional need.

My father, retired professor quoting Camus, says that in times like these we are called upon to guard against the evil in ourselves.  I’m doing my damnedest.  I just won’t give up on any of them.  Because even if the end is ugly, the right now can be a glimmer of self-respect and a hug.  And I don’t know, I guess it’s cliche’, but right now might be all there is.