The Writing Marathon!

We began the marathon at Krannert Art Museum, where I found a seat in a gallery dedicated to art created as part of the WPA.

I grew up looking at paintings that were a product of the WPA. My stepfather’s youngest aunt, Grace, was a skilled artist who studied, as I remember, in Paris during the 1920s. In the thirties, she landed a WPA job that sent her to the Southwest where she painted a series documenting the way of life of the Pueblo Indians. Some of these oils, unframed and filled with the hazy colors of sand and sky, hung in the dining rooms of two houses I lived in between the ages of eleven and nineteen.

I never knew Aunt Grace, but when I began college, I spent a few weeks living at the family homestead with my step-grandparents, Harold and Lois, Grace’s older brother and his wife. (How that came to pass is another story.)  During that time, I was given the suite of rooms Grace had occupied as a young woman.

There was a heavy lock on the outside of the door leading to these rooms–obviously intended, I thought, to keep someone in.  When I inquired about it, Harold thought a very long time before replying.  

Finally, he said, “You know, Grace was an incredible artist from the time she was a little girl. We’d never seen anyone in this town who could paint and draw like that.

“When she was seventeen, she was accepted as a student at the Art Institute in Chicago.  They gave her a full scholarship, and a good thing, too.  We all knew how talented she was–that she needed to go–but there was no way on God’s green earth the family could have paid her way.

“Then, a year or so later, she was offered a chance to study in Paris. When she said there was another scholarship, we didn’t look into it too deep. Why would we? Her dreams–our dreams for her–were coming true. We bought her a steamer trunk, helped her pack, and off she went.

“That was in August.  She wrote weekly all through the fall and into the early winter. Her letters were cheerful, newsy, filled with accounts of the people she met, the sights she saw, the projects she was working on.

“Then, in February, the letters just . . .stopped.

“Not too much later, one of Grace’s professors from the Art Institute paid us a visit. He had received a letter from someone he knew on the Paris faculty. Grace wasn’t herself, the letter said. She wasn’t well.  There had been some trouble.  She wasn’t fit to travel by herself; someone needed to come to Paris and bring her home.

“The whole time the professor was talking to us, there was a strange vagueness to what he said and he wouldn’t meet our eyes. The seriousness of the situation came through loud and clear, but the details were skimpy. When we pressed him, he said he didn’t know anything more. I think he did, though, he just couldn’t bring himself to say.

“When I asked him about her scholarship, whether they’d have her back when she was better, he finally did make eye contact. ‘Scholarship?’ he asked, expression completely baffled. “Grace said her family was footing the bill.”

At that point, Grandpa Harold stopped talking.  He was looking inward, remembering, I think, and also, I’m now sure, sorting through the details of what he’d already told me and deciding what more he wanted to say. What ought he to say to a step-granddaughter he really didn’t know very well? How many family secrets do you reveal, after all, to someone who isn’t really family?

He started up again after a minute, but there was a distance to his tone that hadn’t been there before. “Anyhow,” he said, “we managed to scrape together the money. Dad went and got her and brought her home. And home she stayed for the next two years.” 

And that was that.  He was finished.  But I wasn’t.  

“But what about the lock?” 

“Oh, that.” He sighed.  “Grace had spells,” he said, “when she was a danger to herself, and to other people too, maybe. We had to lock her in.”

I tried a couple of times to get him to tell me more, but after a while I realized he’d said all he had to say on the subject, at least to me.  It was as though, for a brief few moments, he’d forgotten everything except Grace, what had happened to her all those years ago, how it had felt to be her brother.  But mostly he’d forgotten who he was talking to. Mere curiosity doesn’t entitle you to anything, and he was telling me things I didn’t have the right to know.

Demo: SAMANTHA–An Analytical Approach to Character Exploration

SAMANTHA presentation

SAMANTHA Demo Handouts

Reflections on the iSearch

I’ll be honest–I didn’t find the iSearch a particularly productive use of my time. Other than one book, Revision Strategies for Adolescent Writers, which discusses several strategies for making peer review groups function effectively, I found very little in the library to add to the very good materials, both scholarly and more practical/pragmatic, I had already found in my online search. I would feel much more satisfied as the day closes had I used the time to read and reflect on the many materials I already have and begin to imagine how I might integrate more peer review into my classroom in the fall. It is not my intention to be negative and I fully realize other participants, depending on the topic of their inquiry or their own proclivities, may have had an experience different than mine; however, I have been ready to begin digesting the thinking of others and organizing my own ideas so I can move toward implementation in the fall since Friday. I need to move forward.

 

Goals for this Week

• Create a document that synthesizes best practices for peer review
• Outline my demo and finish a draft of the presentation

Link to Inquiry

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1aWX_nTCuUcfIR2dAOd-omjSc-a-VR9U1XBv4jKt-EYU/edit#slide=id.p

Reflection on Week One

 

For the past several years, I have considered participating in the Writers’ Project but have always decided against it, primarily because at the end of the school year, I am intellectually winded. For a variety of reasons, I decided this was the year.  I’m pleased to say that so far I have found the experience rather than draining, as was my fear. 

Demos

Teachers are incorporating writing into their classrooms in so many different ways. At my school, the emphasis in our curriculum documents is primarily on academic writing that will prepare students for the tasks they will need to do well if they take AP and ultimately go to college.  In the last few years, I have often felt I was somehow cheating or subverting the intent of our curriculum when I asked students to respond, reflect, or analyze through anything other than connected prose. Seeing the variety of activities other teachers are using–both traditional and creative–reaffirms my belief that there must be a balance between the two in order to avoid sucking the life out of our discipline. Demos about memes and storyboarding legitimize creative activities from my classroom such as timeshare brochures advertising Animal Farm and responding to art inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Student Work Analysis

For me, the major value of student work analyses has been seeing the same issues I see in my classroom across grade levels. I’ve also enjoyed the format of these sessions. I think it is a protocol that might work well in our PLC on the mornings when we are discussing student work.

Inquiry 

My initial inquiry question focused on multiple ways to provide more, better, and more timely feedback on student writing, as this has become a struggle for me as my students have been doing more and more writing in class. I realized very quickly that the topic was too big. Narrowing the focus to improving the process of peer review feels more manageable  in terms of scope and practicable for the fall. Throughout my career, students in my classroom have had some opportunities to look at and comment on each other’s work, but the results have been uneven and dissatisfying overall. Dedicating significant time to teaching how to review may make a significant difference in what happens in review groups or pairs. I have also found a fair amount of information about using technology to facilitate blind peer review which students in a couple of studies I found report as being most useful to them. We have adopted an online platform that has this capability, so I am excited about the possibilities.  

Writing Time

I love starting my day by writing. I’m currently continuing to work on a piece of fiction I started last summer. 

 

 

 

 

June 14–Interactive Gallery Walk

The gallery walk has led me to reconsider whether I am asking the right question. The comments were reasonable and applicable, but I realized as I read them that almost all of them represent strategies and approaches I already use or have tried, sometimes with good results and sometimes not. It’s possible I ight do better by delving more deeply into one or two of the ancilliary questions.  At this point, with “no more classtime for this activity,” I’m inclined to focus on enhancing peer review and self-editing.

June 13–Thoughts on Inquiry

For many years, on the first day of school, I made a promise to students: “Whatever you write for this class, I will read.”  I also saw giving timely, meaningful feedback as my forte.  At that point, one of my major instructional concerns was carving out class time so students had more opportunities to write.  I was able to do that.  Students in my classes now have more in-class writing time than ever before.  However, as the amount of writing students produce has increased, the quality, quantity, and timeliness of the feedback I provide has declined.

And I no longer make my first day promise.

Although I have not quite distilled my research question, I do know that its intent will be an exploration of the following issues:

1. What are some useful options for providing teacher feedback other than rubrics, traditional comments, and student conferences?
2.  If time constraints prohibit detailed teacher feedback at every step in the writing process, at what points is it essential?
3. What does the research say about the value, instructional and otherwise, of writing for writing’s sake? In other words, what are the payoffs, if any, from asking students to produce writing for which the individual writer is also the intended–and perhaps only–reader?
4. What are some ways to enhance the positive effects of peer review, especially when students are reluctant or unable to provide what they see as meaningful feedback?
5. What tools do students need to become more adept and independent at editing their own work?

My goal is to put manageable classroom practices and systems into place that allow students to continue to produce a large quantity of writing while receiving more and better feedback throughout the writing process.

 

June 12 Reflection

After the first day of UIWP, I am tantalized by the possibility of revitalizing my approach to the teaching of writing which, over the last six or seven years, has stagnated. It is difficult to say exactly why this has happened, though I am unable to dismiss a correlation between my flagging enthusiasm and the increasing emphasis on standardization and quantifiability of both writing instruction and student work. I have watched my own attitude worsen as the kinds of writing I have been asked to facilitate have become more and more narrowly focused on forms and elements that can be described discretely, assessed through an often arbitrary collection of attributes, and reduced to a data set. Consequently–perhaps inevitably–my students’ writing experiences have also narrowed, and I see less enthusiasm about writing and more generic products than at any time in my teaching career. Speaking as someone who loves to write and has taken joy in helping students use the written word to articulate their ideas and experiences, both real and imagined, the current state of writing instruction in my own classroom hurts my heart.

All that said, I am well aware that nothing I will learn at UIWP, in and of itself, will change the prevailing winds or national climate; history shows that systemic pedagogical change is recursive, politically contentious, and slow. However, at this point teachers still have the power to shape the microclimates that exist within their classrooms, damping the effect of those prevailing winds when they are injurious to students. I have abdicated some of that power as it pertains to writing instruction. I intend to take it back. I am hopeful the next three weeks of teaching demonstrations, thoughtful conversation, and exploration will provide the necessary groundwork to set that process in motion.

 

(Below, you see one of Ms. Wickersham’s weeds, cressleaf groundsel, also know as butterweed.)