Celebrate and Discuss the National Gallery of Writing

[Mila M. Fuller]

Click here to start a new discussion thread about a specific piece in the National Gallery of Writing or feel free to share the link to your piece. Click here to join an existing discussion.

[Leif Fearn]

I would like to celebrate the national day on writing by urging school folks to wonder, to ponder, in a word, to exercise curiosity relative to what's going on here. What's wrong with this picture? Just about everything we do in the name of writing instruction, if we listen to the lamentations of our colleagues two years up the grades, goes bad. For example, we start teaching paragraph thinking and writing in the second grade, and our colleagues in the fourth, seventh, eleventh, thirteenth, and seventeenth find it necessary to teach paragraph thinking and writing. My sense of curiosity makes me wonder why. It isn't poor teaching; in my 50 years of professional practice, I cannot say that the people I have known in my profession are incapable of teaching paragraph thinking and writing well. Why do students in grades 2-6 spell words correctly on Friday's test but not in Monday's story? Why do students who learn the vocabulary necessary to read the assigned passage not use those words when they write? Why are middle school and high school students' synopses (summaries) so routinely rudimentary? Why do September and May scores on analytic writing assessments look so much the same, as though no one learned much about writing better during the nine months? The answer is not poor teachers. The people I know are terrific teachers, and they are terrific teachers of all their students. They aren't terrific for half the room and incompetent for the other half, and the half of them on one side of town aren't terrific and the other half on the other side incompetent. Is it possible that we are teaching the wrong stuff, brilliantly? I will celebrate this national day on writing by challenging my students to be curious about the kinds of questions for which room arrangement and diminutive lessons appear not to be relevant to satisfying the kinds of reasonable performance expectations in writing that we satisfy in reading and mathematics, and the arts, when we teach them.

[Kent Williamson]

Leif, I'm not sure if you are a member of NCTE or it's Conference on English Education, but in the latest issue of English Education Bob Yagelski (in an article entitled A Thousand Writers Writing: Seeking Change through the Radical Practice of Writing as a Way of Being) offers a radical and refreshing view of what's important in the teaching of writing. Let me offer you an excerpt here and I'll encourage Bob to plug into this conversation:

English Education and Writing as a Way of Being
Every year I teach a graduate seminar in the teaching of writing in secondary
schools. In 2008, Tina, who had taught high school English for six years
in South Central Los Angeles before returning to her hometown in upstate
New York to start a family, enrolled in the course. After taking a job at a high
school near Albany, New York, Tina began work on the master’s degree that
New York State requires for permanent certification. It was fortuitous timing,
for Tina was in the midst of a profound questioning of her teaching, and she
saw my course as an opportunity to rethink some of her beliefs about teaching
writing. For her midterm self-evaluation, she described the struggle that
working with adolescent writers within the mainstream education system
had become for her:

I have always loved my job, but for the past four years, I have been struggling
to reconcile the contradictions inherent in writing instruction. The
increasing emphasis on accountability and standardization requires us to
teach one way, but what we as writers know to be true of writing requires
us to teach another way. As a result of these two conflicting approaches
to writing instruction, I find myself in an ongoing struggle to satisfy both
the administration and my conscience.

While I had hoped this course, its required reading and writing,
would help me find a middle ground, a workable compromise if you will,
I am more and more coming to the realization a compromise is not what
my students need. What they need is a writing teacher who is brave enough
to stop “teaching” writing. As writing teachers we are simply responsible
for providing our students opportunities to write in safe and constructive
environments, and that is the teaching.

Tina went on to write, “The first writing assignment for this course reminded
me how important it is that we write about what we need to write about.”
For that class’ assignment, which was simply to write about something that
mattered to them, Tina wrote about her experiences as a teacher in Los
Angeles. Through that assignment and subsequent writing, Tina came to the
realization that the enormous effort she devoted to form and correctness in
her classes ultimately did not serve her students well, either as writers or as
human beings coming of age in a complex world. Through her writing, Tina
began to confront the possibility that an obsession with text ultimately prevented
her students from realizing the power of writing as she experienced
it. She eloquently articulated the struggle that so many English teachers
I have met experience: how to reconcile the increasing institutional and
cultural pressures to emphasize “standards” in writing with the nagging
sense that maintaining these standards may not truly serve students’ needs.

[Robert Yagelski]

I was deeply touched to read your post, Leif. You’re right: we expend an astounding amount of time and energy teaching the wrong stuff. As I look back over my 20+ years of experience teaching writing at various levels of schooling, I see ever more clearly how much time I’ve wasted on matters that don’t really matter. And in my work with the National Writing Project and in K-12 schools, I so often I see teachers struggling with the same questions you raise so compellingly in your post. Like you, these teachers know that something isn't right with what we do in schools--something isn’t right with mainstream writing instruction that seems to squeeze the joy and complexity potential power out of writing and reduce it to a set of rules and procedures used to sort and control kids. The teachers I work with sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with this state of affairs, yet they're not always sure what it is or, more important, what to do about it. So they do their best to find ways to serve their students’ needs as writers and as human beings, even as the increasing pressure to meet so-called standards and to prepare students for standardized tests works against their best efforts to make writing joyful and powerful for their students. Some of them find solace in working with NWP, because there they find like-minded teachers who understand their struggles and frustrations. But many struggle on alone.

The National Day on Writing is an event that may help clarify some of the questions you raise and crystallize the efforts of teachers who genuinely wish to give their students access to this amazing experience of writing. I hope so. To me, what’s important about this event is that it provides an opportunity for teachers like you to raise their voices in opposition to the drumbeat for “standards” and standardization that is overtaking our sense of the mission of schooling. We need your voice--and the voices of like-minded teachers--to help the public see that we are indeed all too often teaching the wrong stuff, as you put it. Thanks for taking the time to share this message with all of us.

Bob Yagelski